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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#111

Post by xyzelement »

The author says that he's not a product manager and doesn't have a particular insight. As a PM, I can share how I think:

The main question is "does it matter?" The answer depends case by case.

For example, if I am the PM for TurboTax Premier desktop software, I know that it's latent - but it probably doesn't matter in a way that deserves prioritization. Sure, my clients would like for the forms to load faster, but they care infinitely more about the scope of tax situations we cover, and the correctness of calculation. A person uses my product a few hours per year, so even if there's an accumulated minute of form refresh latency, it's just not that impactful. What that means is - if I have an "extra developer", I am going to direct them towards product scope and correctness, not latency.

On the other hand, something like VSCODE (an example the article mentions), speed is part of the value proposition. As a developer, I need to quickly change text, quickly look up a reference, quickly switch files, etc. If things are sluggish, it isn't just frustrating but limits my ability to do development work. So a user of a slow IDE would be very motivated to seek alternatives, since they basically live in the IDE. As a PM, I would absolutely invest in performance if it was making my product actually less useful.

It's like anything else, investment has a tradeoff. Chances are, whatever car you drive could have a faster 0-60 speed and in isolation, that would be great. But are you willing to pay 10x for the car? Are you willing to give up the seats and the trunk to make it happen? So your car may not have the best 0-60, but if it's an affordable family minivan that's probably the right call.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#112

Post by dalmo3 »

amalcon wrote: post #15
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The 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 may have lost days on aggregate from just waiting many seconds for the browser to respond after an accidental Ctrl+s that triggers "Save Page" - why is that operation so slow anyway?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#113

Post by ryanblakeley »

jedberg wrote: post #69

People 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 he…

What's the difference between caring and affecting behavior? If people cancel their subscriptions after a major outage, wouldn't it be reasonable to interpret that some of them cared about performance and reliability?

I know I care. If I pay for something and it sucks, I stop paying for it because it's not up to my expectations.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#114

Post by rgmerk »

My boss cares a lot about performance and reliability.

I work for a financial services firm. We are consistently highly rated for customer service. One of the reasons that is the case is that our website is fast.

It takes a lot of work by our devs for that to happen!

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#115

Post by bob1029 »

agentultra wrote: post #7

I 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…

I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions.

As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system.

Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regulations), they will start doing our marketing for us.

I feel like tuning software for the human factor is something that almost every MBA still misses to this day. Making "this software feels good to use" an explicit objective is clearly impossible. You have to want the experience to be good at a fundamental level. Its an ambient part of every item that merges. You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#116

Post by Our_Benefactors »

godshatter wrote: post #103
agloe_dreams wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My IDE auto-saves as you make changes This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.

The most annoying thing for me is that the idea of take something similar, make my changes to it, and save it under a different name only mangles the original file in today's world.

“Save” vs “Save as” is such a terrible convention…

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#117

Post by Sinidir »

agloe_dreams wrote: post #98
ehnto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My IDE auto-saves as you make changes, yet I still mash ctrl+s frequently. I think it's mostly games that gave me the habit though. PC gaming has always been a gauntlet.

> My IDE auto-saves as you make changes This gave me shutters. Maybe it is some sort of manual transmission-type feeling of control, but that is terrifying to me. Something about that feeling of owning when the source file is changed.

Felt the same way after first going from eclipse to intellij. This fear, this lack off. But after a while i didn't notice anymore and i have never run into a situation where something important was lost. In the opposite. Saving and making copies and even duplicating code in a file like an older version of an sql statement is some kind of fear/hoarding impulse, that doesn't seem to pay off at all.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#118

Post by branweb »

jaclaz wrote: post #92
gilbetron wrote: post #9

The 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…

Only as a corollary, to put things in perspective, in the early '90's that was Windows 3.x on a 33-66-100 Mhz CPU with 4, maybe 8 MB (yes megabytes) of RAM and programs had a splash screen to mask the fact that they were very slow loading. With at least 20x processor speed, double the bits, and 1000x memory (let alone SSD's) I would have expected something better than what we have.

exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#119

Post by Our_Benefactors »

harry8 wrote: post #54
crazygringo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating quite a bit. Anyone can watch this video [1] to see how long it actually took to boot up or launch Word. But bootup seems to take 20 seconds, and launching Word took 7 seconds. Which roughly matches my memory. So about an order of magnitude slower than you're describing. (The SE/30 had a clock speed twice that of the SE, but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed.…

>but launching things is mostly bound by the hard drive speed. which got slower and slower taking swap speed with it, which slowed down everything you were actually using. You'd defrag the drive regularly and that wouldn't do it so you'd have to wipe and reinstall from scratch. And that was some hours of work but like having a brand new machine again when you were done. You couldn't believe how bad it had degraded to…

Windows reinstall every few years still gives a performance bump IME, nvme SSD be damned. It’s hard to keep a windows installation clean with all the startup junk that worms its way in over time.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#120

Post by rojobuffalo »

0xb0565e487 wrote: post #42
trollied wrote: post #5

I think performance simply just isn't on the radar of a big chunk of devs these days, especially self-taught ones. Front-end wise, what with the trend of using frameworks (react/vue/etc) & a billion lines of javascript downloaded from npm, it'd probably be too much of a task to even begin profiling.

As a "one of these day devs" I only care about performance when it starts becoming a problem and I see nothing wrong with the way I'm going about this.

The problem is that performance and reliability are issues that creep up and by the time they're a problem, they are much more expensive to fix than if they had been first class priorities from the outset. Everyone who didn't care before finds new reasons to put it off because now it's so expensive to address.
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