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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

#251

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pixl97 wrote: post #238
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, in an ideal world you could get an 'idiot' version that would meet all your needs and run nothing extra and be nice and fast If I'm not using it, why is it slowing the application down? I don't buy this reasoning. Binaries are not big in modern terms and they don't go slower for including code that never runs.

If by never runs, you mean things like automatic grammar and spell checking, which way back when were things you'd click a menu to run, and now are constantly running reassessing your lifes worth every time you click a new key. There tend to be any number of 'small' things like this that add up over time and suddenly we're running slow. It also doesn't help many applications followed the Apple school of thought and r…

Dude, I can run the entirety of Windows 95 in a VM (itself running in a browser) and Word from that era on top of it and it is still orders of magnitude faster than Word today. So

> Your word processor is likely running in a virtualized environment in your operating system

Is also not a good reason.

This is what we're saying! None of the "good" reasons given for why software is slow today stand up under scrutiny!

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#252

Post by quanticle »

agentultra wrote: post #236
quanticle wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended. A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll prob…

    What makes SAP secure?
Nothing, inherently. What makes SAP secure is that a lot of IT organizations have experience with setting it up, and know enough about its pitfalls to avoid them. With a new product, IT is going to have figure out the security pitfalls (hopefully by reading documentation, but more likely through testing, hopefully not through breaches). If, as the grandparent post indicates, the product was set up by someone outside of IT, it's quite likely that that person doesn't actually know about security, and may well have inadvertently opened a security hole by, for example, creating an insecure proxy account.

To re-emphasize my point from my original post: far more security problems result from the interaction of systems than result from systems themselves. SAP may be set up in a perfectly secure manner. The new product may be set up in a secure manner. However, their interaction may still result in data leakage or denial of service.

Even if your product is perfectly secure (which it isn't), the mere fact that it's one more component, interacting with all the other components of the company's IT infrastructure, is reason enough for broader corporate IT to be cautious.

Furthermore, it's often the case that when there is a problem, security or otherwise, it's not going to be your customer that's on the hook. It's going to be the company's IT department. Would you like to suddenly support a piece of software that, a week prior, you didn't even know existed, much less deployed at your company?

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#253

Post by 9erdelta »

astrange wrote: post #218
9erdelta wrote: post #197

Earlier 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.

That's a fair point...I tend to be paranoid about these things, and I think your point reinforces mine to an extent. Yeah I have simple taxes, and yet couldn't feel confident about it through TurboTax. But at this point we're way off topic!

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#254

Post by cratermoon »

xyzelement wrote: post #111

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 th…

> A person uses my product a few hours per year

I gather from this comment that the software is only used by individuals filing their own returns, not by professional tax-preparers or accountants. The latter two certainly spend more than a "a few hours per year" in whatever product they use for preparation. When it's tax season and they have to get the work done by April 15, professional aren't going to tolerate a few more minutes per customer.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#256

Post by bombcar »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #186
adamckay wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does indeed. Here's an article that discusses it more [1]. I know of a few thins that introduce an artificial wait with a progress bar to make the user feel like it's doing something complex. There's also situations in the real world too, coin counting machines apparently also delay showing the results because people won't believe that dumping a jar full of coins into a machine and having an instant answer can be…

The third example (locksmiths) I get, they're making a little show to avoid a difficult conversation with some customers[0]. A bit scummy, but then again, plenty of customers are no saints themselves. However, the first two examples feel like self-fulfilling prophesies to me. Normal people have no reference point to judge how fast or slow software and hardware should be, other than through direct experience. By addin…

I think the locksmith thing comes from a couple of things:

1. Some disreputable locksmiths (word gets around) - probably very few

2. A locksmith will try the fast methods first, if they work he wins, if they don’t he didn’t waste too much time.

3. After doing a lock once he could immediately redo the same lock much faster and this may make it look like he could have done it very fast to begin

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#257

Post by bombcar »

bob1029 wrote: post #240
gowld wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> IRS isn't trying to put you in jail, they just want you to file correctly. A lot of people would live much easier lives if they believed this. You can make a really half-assed filing and all they will ever do is send you an invoice for the difference. In fact, you could simply not file your taxes ever and the IRS will eventually inform you of your actual tax burden, at which point you should probably pay accordingl…

The IRS is one of the most reasonable divisions of the government to get in a fight with, and there are insane amounts of protections built in for people who honestly believe they’re filing correctly. My dad even had them inform him of a filing error and included the additional much larger return he was due.

What you hear about and what they WILL get you for is deliberate fraud.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#258

Post by bpowell »

zabzonk wrote: post #189
JohnFen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All good questions, asked by all the devs here. I'm not about to defend the use of this particular product. I was just pointing to an example of FOSS that not only isn't free, it's very expensive.

sorry, but i really can't believe this. to start with how can foss manage a per seat license? i get needing support, but if you have the code (which you must else it is not foss) why can't you strip out the per seat code (which is a no-no in my experience on closed code) and just pay a one-off/per problem support contract?

My guess would be something like Docker Desktop for Mac. It's free for personal use, but if you are using it from a company standpoint, it is not free

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#259

Post by gmane »

quanticle wrote: post #252
agentultra wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended. A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll prob…

What makes SAP secure? Nothing, inherently. What makes SAP secure is that a lot of IT organizations have experience with setting it up, and know enough about its pitfalls to avoid them. With a new product, IT is going to have figure out the security pitfalls (hopefully by reading documentation, but more likely through testing, hopefully not through breaches). If, as the grandparent post indicates, the product was set…

To your point: I remember going to our IT security people asking for them to allow us to add Python to our computers. We said, "there's nothing in Python that Excel can't do" (not 100% true). Their response was, "If we could prohibit everyone from using Excel, that would be our preference too."

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#260

Post by bombcar »

JohnFen wrote: post #176
ryanblakeley wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people do care about these things, but they don't always know what it is, precisely, they're caring about. They just know that the thing they have is disappointing.

The problem for the company is the people just silently leave. They don’t cry they don’t complain they just go away.

That’s what kills companies.

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