I am sometimes surprised how work on optimization (unless explicitly demanded) is regarded negatively. Just do it anyway. No it does not add to my salary but it does wonders for my self-worth and work satisfaction.
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
221–230 of 280 posts
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, I stopped using TurboTax (after using it for 8 years) for 2 reasons. I was never confident that my tax situation was being handled correctly. The UI is noisy, the explanations don't explain. So I would buy audit insurance just in case. The second reason, it was slow and navigating between pages and sections was annoying. So now I pay a real person to do my taxes. It takes a quarter of the time, costs abo…
If you're not self-employed there's like a 0% chance you're getting your taxes wrong by holding TurboTax wrong. If you're FAANG there is some chance you're overpaying by not doing the RSU cost basis properly.
I imported Coinbase Pro transactions and they all got counted as short-term gains because they'd been moved from Coinbase to Coinbase Pro within the past year, despite having been purchased several years prior.
Now, you can definitely make the case that this is mostly Coinbase's fault for not sending over the actual purchase date, but TurboTax charged me a bunch of money to do that import, so I feel like they should have done some basic quality control.
I don't trust TurboTax to get my taxes right, because last year they got it very, very wrong.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often). Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable? Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. People whine about bloate…
> Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms. Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects i…
>WinAMP reigns supreme.
I mean, kinda but not really.
Back in the day a large number of us likely had huge (exceptionally legally questionable) MP3 libraries that we managed. And while, yea having 100GB of music with just about everything was nice, it is also a major pain in the ass. So much so that Winamp pretty much died after streaming (long with legal issues in MP3s) took over the market.
Now, if the music market wasn't legally locked down, would there be better streaming apps? I believe so. So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#224The 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 th…
Anecdotally, I stopped using TurboTax (after using it for 8 years) for 2 reasons. I was never confident that my tax situation was being handled correctly. The UI is noisy, the explanations don't explain. So I would buy audit insurance just in case. The second reason, it was slow and navigating between pages and sections was annoying. So now I pay a real person to do my taxes. It takes a quarter of the time, costs abo…
Audit insurance is a scam. If you get audited, you just update your return (unless IRS already did that for you) and pay (or get credit for) the correction. IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly.
What do you think the "real person" does? They put your data into TurboTax or equivalent.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 br…
Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
My experience is admittedly limited but every case I've seen of IT being called in late was that IT would have reasons for no. The VP didn't even learn their lesson when circumventing IT ended up with all corporate e-mail down for nearly a week. (As predicted, although it ended up taking longer to fix because I was on the other side of the world, internet access but unreachable by phone.)
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
On today's hardware, or on hardware of the time? Things like word used to be much better in speed of the interface - it used to take fewer clicks to do stuff
On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.
Honestly this is the worst take yet.
Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't.
People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, I stopped using TurboTax (after using it for 8 years) for 2 reasons. I was never confident that my tax situation was being handled correctly. The UI is noisy, the explanations don't explain. So I would buy audit insurance just in case. The second reason, it was slow and navigating between pages and sections was annoying. So now I pay a real person to do my taxes. It takes a quarter of the time, costs abo…
Audit insurance is a scam. If you get audited, you just update your return (unless IRS already did that for you) and pay (or get credit for) the correction. IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly. What do you think the "real person" does? They put your data into TurboTax or equivalent.
This. The IRS will only come after you if they think you were deliberately lying. Mistakes are simply to be fixed even when they are doozies. (One year I ended up amending my previous year's return because I had managed to fat-finger an extra digit into a number. It didn't change my tax bill *that year* by a single penny so nothing looked off. It was only when I saw the huge amount of losses being carried forward that I realized something was off. I didn't get any sort of complaint from the IRS about that despite it being a 5-figure error.)
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#228Earlier 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…
Another reason that people often overlook is security. Even if each individual software product has a good security model, differences in the way they interact can lead to security vulnerabilities and opportunities for attackers to move laterally through a network. In the case above, it may be that IT knows how to integrate SAP with their Active Directory system in a manner that ensures that users have access to the data that they need, without giving everyone write access to everything. A brand new product from some small startup, even if it's competently engineered, won't have the same pre-set integration playbooks as SAP. The in-house IT will have to figure it out themselves, which adds time and overhead for every operation. New hire? Before, you'd give them a SAP account, and you'd have a playbook that would automatically or semi-automatically provision everything for them. Now, you have to provision accounts in two systems. Compliance? IT already knows how to validate an SAP install for compliance and generate a report for the appropriate regulators. Now they're going to have to learn to do that with your new system. And so on.
I listen to several infosec podcasts, and one recurring theme in those podcasts is managing users who do "shadow IT", i.e. by buying and integrating new products or software that make their day-to-day jobs easier, but do so in a manner that opens up huge gaping security holes that IT doesn't even know about… until the breach happens and the company is all over the news for leaking customer data.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#229From a business point of view, performance and reliability (and code quality) are irrelevant. The most important thing is that the product has a market to explore. We can see this in many products. I've been working with software since 1999, I've never seen any developer or manager worry about performance. I've seen a religious battle over formatting or using a Java library, or "it's not the Ruby way". I never partic…
I agree. Typically when it comes to UI issues features and being first to market tend to win over speed. Simply put the slowness of the average human interacting with the software is a much larger factor then the software itself.
Of course this is also to a point. 1 second versus 10 seconds to do a major software operation isn't going to affect most users. Now stretch that out to 100 seconds and priorities start changing. You get in the 'really annoying to people' zone.
I think one of the differences when looking at performance is how many times it is executed. I might pull up some customer record/ticket in SAP 50 times a day. If its 1 second or 10 seconds doesn't matter that much because I can generally interweave it with other operations I'm performing. Now, if for some reason I was executing that a million time a day, like a single database query, suddenly we're talking about an issue that's worth fixing.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
On today's hardware. The point is just to show that modern software is slower and less efficient than older software.
Honestly this is the worst take yet. Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't. People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.
How many spreadsheets are that big? And how much bloat do you think supporting that accounts for?