4 ms·

We're not talking about writing assembly by hand here. If your software has a million daily users and wastes a minute of their day, that's about 9 work-years of

We're not talking about writing assembly by hand here. If your software has a million daily users and wastes a minute of their day, that's about 9 work-years of labour wasted every single day. In a 5-year lifecycle that's about 10,000 years of human labour wasted. Yes, I had to quadruple-check this myself. Does it take 10,000 work-years of effort, per project, to train its developers to write reasonably performant code? Of course not all of this would translate into actual productivity gains but it doesn't have to.

charcircuit 6mo ago
You are failing to consider the opportunity cost of how much more work-years can be saved by making a new feature.
jstummbillig 6mo ago
What world are you living in where the median piece of software has a million users? Or even a hundredth of that?
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  It's what many software companies dream of and aim for. But the same argument works with 10k users, or even 1k users.
- dns_snek 6mo ago
  I'm not talking about the median piece of software with 2 users and 0.1 developers (I made that up). The ones that stick out are actively maintained, widely used, and well funded. It doesn't have to be a million active users, but they should be the first to get their act together.
- shermantanktop 6mo ago
  I work on software with millions of users..? Sure, it’s not the median, but it exists and there’s a lot of it. Unfortunately the number of users and the collective value of their wasted time doesn’t make arguing for efficiency and performance any easier.
- herewulf 6mo ago
  The one we're in where "software" doesn't just mean an app that someone downloads from a website or an app store. Software includes lots of server side components, etc, etc. I once noticed my name in the Chromium OS credits due to a patch I had submitted to a library that's on every Chromebook. 1 million would be a small number for Chromebooks alone.

charcircuit 6mo ago

You are failing to consider the opportunity cost of how much more work-years can be saved by making a new feature.

jstummbillig 6mo ago

What world are you living in where the median piece of software has a million users? Or even a hundredth of that?

TeMPOraL 6mo ago
It's what many software companies dream of and aim for. But the same argument works with 10k users, or even 1k users.
dns_snek 6mo ago
I'm not talking about the median piece of software with 2 users and 0.1 developers (I made that up). The ones that stick out are actively maintained, widely used, and well funded. It doesn't have to be a million active users, but they should be the first to get their act together.
shermantanktop 6mo ago
I work on software with millions of users..? Sure, it’s not the median, but it exists and there’s a lot of it. Unfortunately the number of users and the collective value of their wasted time doesn’t make arguing for efficiency and performance any easier.
herewulf 6mo ago
The one we're in where "software" doesn't just mean an app that someone downloads from a website or an app store. Software includes lots of server side components, etc, etc. I once noticed my name in the Chromium OS credits due to a patch I had submitted to a library that's on every Chromebook. 1 million would be a small number for Chromebooks alone.