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> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delive
by Aurornis 11mo ago
> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time.
I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric
This has been common wisdom for decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.
- dijit 11mo agoI worked in e-commerce SaaS in 2011~ and this was true then but I find it less true these days. Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals? I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.
- jama211 11mo agoDiscord’s user base is 99% people who leave it running 100% of the time, it’s not a typical situation
- dijit 11mo agoI think that they make the startup so horrible that people are more likely to leave it running.
- hexer292 11mo agoAs a discord user, it's the kind of platform that I would want to have running to receive notifications, sort of like the SMS of gaming. A large part of my friend group use discord as the primary method of communication, even in an in person context (was at a festival a few months ago with a friend, and we would send texts over discord if we got split up) so maybe its not a common use case.
- jama211 11mo agoI strongly doubt that!
- jama211 11mo agoHikacking my own comment to mention that the normal thing on forums when a reasonable person reads an unreasonable comment is they move on, which can make the comment stand unopposed which gives it credence it doesn’t deserve. I believe if more of us actually showed our disagreement out loud as I have here, it could change things sometimes.
- solarkraft 11mo agoIt leads to me dreading having to start it (or accidentally starting it - remember IE?) and opting for the browser instead.
- drob518 11mo agoYep, indeed. Which is the main reason I don’t run Discord.
- jama211 11mo agoI strongly doubt that. The main reason you don’t run it is likely because you don’t have strong motivation to do so, or you’d push through the odd start up time.
- oceanplexian 11mo agoJust going to throw out an anecdote that I don’t use it for the same reason. It’s closed unless I get a DM on my phone and then I suffer the 2-3 minute startup/failed update process and quit it again. Not a fan of leaving their broken, resource hogging app running at all times.
- Flere-Imsaho 11mo agoFor me, I really dislike the fact Discord is completely closed off to the wider internet, and Discord, the company, has absolute control: from a privacy and freedom of speech point of view. This goes against the core ideas of a free and open internet. I'll admit that the Discord service is really good from a UX point of view.
- spockz 11mo agoI have the same experience on windows. On the other hand, starting up discord on my cachyos install is virtually instant. So maybe there is also a difference between the platform the developers use and that their users use.
- godelski 11mo agoI have plenty of responses to an angry comment I made several months ago that supports your point. I made a slight at Word taking like 10 seconds to start and some people came back saying it only takes 2, as if that still isn't 2s too long. Then again, look at how Microsoft is handling slow File Explorer speeds... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944352
- saagarjha 11mo agoI never said that 2s wasn’t too long. I just said your environment was broken if it took 10.
- yndoendo 11mo agoThere is a high chance the extra nuts and bolts added to Windows, which slow it down, are IT required softwoods, settings, and security enhancements. Took me almost a year to get a separate laptop laptop for office and development. Their Enhanced Security prevented me from testing administrative code features and broke Visual Studios bug submission system, which Microsoft requires you to use for posting software bugs. By the way, I can brake Windows simply by running their PowerShell utilities to configure NICs. Windows is not the stable product people think it is.
- saagarjha 11mo agoThis was on macOS
- godelski 11mo agoWild. How'd you even find me
- saagarjha 11mo agoI read the comments on this post
- rovr138 11mo agoThere was a thread here earlier this month, > Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 Section of the top comment says, > It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary! and the reply to it has, > They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.
- ux266478 11mo agoThat's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice? Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.
- rovr138 11mo agoYes. They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.
- pjmlp 11mo agoAn exception that confirms the rule.
- mindslight 11mo ago> every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric Are they evaluating the shape of that line with the same goal as the stonk score? Time spent by users is an "engagement" metric, right?
- eviks 11mo agoThe issue here is not tracking, but developing. Like, how do you explain the fact that whole classes of software have gotten worse on those "key metrics"? (and that includes web-selling webpages)
- ponector 11mo agoContrary, every consumer facing product I've worked had no performance metrics tracked. And for enterprise software it was even worse as the end user is not the one who makes a decision to buy and use software. >>what you mean by software houses How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app.
- philipallstar 11mo ago> How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app. If your users are trapped due to a lack of competition then this can definitely happen.
- pjmlp 11mo agoIf only community actually gathered around the true Linux distribution instead of endless forks.
- philipallstar 11mo agoExactly. Let's start by listing all the true Linux distributions and we can go from there!
- julianz 11mo agoThe Start menu is not an Electron app. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
- Spooky23 11mo agoThat makes the usability and performance of the windows start menu even more embarrassing. The decline of Windows as a user facing product is amazing, especially as they are really good at developing things they care about. The “back of house” guts of Windows has improved alot, for example. They should just have a cartoon Bill Gates pop up like clippy and flip you the bird at this point.
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- moregrist 11mo ago> I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example. This is true for sites that are trying to make sales. You can quantify how much a delay affects closing a sale. For other apps, it’s less clear. During its high-growth years, MS Office had an abysmally long startup time. Maybe this was due to MS having a locked-in base of enterprise users. But given that OpenOffice and LibreOffice effectively duplicated long startup times, I don’t think it’s just that. You also see the Adobe suite (and also tools like GIMP) with some excruciatingly long startup times. I think it’s very likely that startup times of office apps have very little impact on whether users will buy the software.
- delaminator 11mo agoThey even made it render the screen but still be unusable to make it look like it was running.
- epmatsw 11mo agoEvery SSRed app these days…
- croes 11mo agoThen why do many software house favor cloud software over on premise? They often have a recognizable delay to user data input compared to local software
- kevin_thibedeau 11mo agoThe MBAs hate capital expenditures and love operating expenditures. They'll make strategic blunders like over-dependence on external services just to satisfy their warped mindset.
- venturecruelty 11mo ago>I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric. Then respectfully, uh, why is basically all proprietary software slow as ass?
- j_w 11mo agoClearly Amazon doesn't care about that sentiment across the board. Plenty of their products are absurdly slow because of their poor engineering.
- Yoric 11mo agoCan confirm at least for Firefox. When I worked on it, I've spent literal years shaving seconds from startup, or shutdown, or milliseconds from tab switching. Everybody likes to hate Telemetry, and yes, it can be abused, but that's how Mozilla (and its competitors) manage to make user's life more comfortable.
- xp84 11mo ago> every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric Must be nice. In my career, all working on webapps, I've seen a few leaders popping in to ask us to fix a particularly egregious performance issue if the right customers complain, but aside from those finely-targeted and limited-attention-span drives to "improve performance" it seems the answer for the past decade or so is just to assume everyone is on at least a gigabit connection, stick fingers in ears, and just keep adding more node modules. If the developers' disks get full because node_modules got too big, buy a bigger SSD and keep going. (ok that last part is slight hyperbole but I also don't think frontend devs would be deterred from their ravenous appetite for libraries by a full disk).
- ponector 10mo ago>> I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric Maybe Google? Gmail app is 700+ MB