I've worked at a number of big companies that have run experiments on TTI & response times and they've all shown statistically significant results that responsiveness impacts revenue, engagement & retention.
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
61–70 of 280 posts
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#62The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…
Microsoft Word 97 might have felt laggy when I ran it on a first-generation Pentium CPU, but the race to the GHz bailed it out. Now that Moore's Law is running out of room, what's going to bail out this generation of software bloat?
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#63The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…
> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.
I still can’t get used to Confluence exiting edit mode upon Ctrl+S.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#64The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…
> MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, It's an old joke at this point that you can tell when a person first became a serious computer user based on how frequently they save their work. My muscle memory for ctrl+s is so ingrained that I type it every minute or two in things like Google Docs that literally ignore it.
Pretty much every time I finish typing something I end with ctrl+S. Its muscle memory from the old days, but now it triggers vs code to format whatever I just wrote, which is a convenient side effect.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#65I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…
> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?
At one point I wore a hat in a IT leadership role for factories. We hated third party software because it created silo's where our data became un-usable. There is no point in an MRP/ERP factory system if all the bits aren't talking/working together. People fight and fight you as you try to get there, but once you get there and it all starts to work together and you no longer have jobs travelers looking like daisies with escalations all over they get it and their life gets significantly better.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
How bloated software can become is limited by available hardware resources. 20-30 years ago typical RAM size / CPU core count where much smaller than nowadays. If you run desktop software written 20 years ago on modern hardware it would work much faster than modern desktop software with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). But I'd agree that there was plenty bloated software which run slow on hardware…
That reminds me of the old @bruised_blood comic: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/926458505355235328
its really a perfect continuation of the Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Really succinct fast code probably takes more time than verbose, slow code.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#67The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…
Microsoft Word 97 might have felt laggy when I ran it on a first-generation Pentium CPU, but the race to the GHz bailed it out. Now that Moore's Law is running out of room, what's going to bail out this generation of software bloat?
The widespread availability of high-bandwidth and low-latency Internet access is what's been bailing out the latest generation of software bloat, not individual CPU performance.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?
I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing so…
> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they!
Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was brought in at the last minute to try and get it all to work in an unreasonable time frame. And then IT was asked it integrate it in impossible ways.
If another department brings IT in early, different story. I got in to IT to use technology to make people's lives easier, not to play with whatever the latest fad bullshit is or develop an inflated sense of self-worth. If some random nobody's software is going to do that at the cost of a minor annoyance to me, that's fine.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#69People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior.
Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation.
At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected.
And I've heard similar from other people in the reliability space -- that there is no direct impact on retention from availability issues, but you can see an effect in the long term.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
IT folks hated it? Or maybe just the bigwigs? You don’t say why but guessing because you innovated away their headcount.
I assume that they were having to do end-user support. I was working in IT at that time and recognise that reaction from IT.
Oh you just need to support this XYZ new database, our app doesn't have a way deploy with your deploy tools, doesn't have granular permissions levels (in a factory environment), etc. Why do you not want our tool? Also, we will silo away a bunch of data needed for an MRP/ERP system to be effective to our system outside the MRP/ERP system. Silly IT people, not understanding our work environment (even though you support every person on the factory floor and have to understand their job and workflow to do that, to the point your techs are better manufacturing engineers than our actual MEs).