Performance excuses debunked • Hacker News Board

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#41

Post by camgunz » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:22 AM UTC

devjab wrote: post #33

Performance matters, but I’m not sure people are saying that it doesn’t. I’m not a performance “first” type of programmer by any means, but I always keep it in the back of my mind, what I also tend to keep in the back of my mind is cost. I recently “inherited” a couple of back-end services when a developer left our company. It turned out that the code was terrible and that they haven’t used, any, or our helper tools.…

The points he lays out at the beginning of his post are basically Martin Fowler's (and thus 90% of enterprise engineers') position in Refactoring. Fowler was probably responding to engineers making code inscrutable in the name of (dubious claims of) performance, and Muratori here is responding to the ensuing overreaction.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#42

Post by ahtihn » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:24 AM UTC

omnicognate wrote: post #24

charlie0 wrote: post #20

Starts off with premise of why performance matters and why you should care. Proceeds to only top 10 biggest tech companies as examples. Are you working in a FAANG? If not, this article does nothing to convince me that I should care about performance (even though I kinda do).

He's a games programmer. He's using examples outside his industry to illustrate that his points aren't specific to games (excuse 4). What industry would you like him to talk about?

B2B SaaS targeting "enterprise" customers. You know the kind where the people making the buying decision aren't users.

Does Atlassian look like they care about the performance of their products? Is it a significant factor in their sales?

Does the average ERP or CRM system compete on performance?

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#43

Post by eastbound » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

globalreset wrote: post #38

HideousKojima wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that people don't want to be competent. There are plenty of devs that are just there for the paycheck and have minimal passion or interest in learning more.

True, but it's normal in many professions that lots of people working in it are not passionate and industry just deals with it. We can't expect that average software developer is going to be passionate and spending their weekends honing every-increasing set of skills: technologies, platforms, tools, etc.

Can’t we?

The entire startup ecosystem is based on extracting from the economy people who are motivated, do their work efficiently and learn high skills, and giving them millionaire-or-bankrupt stakes to ensure they’re committed.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#44

Post by simula67 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:27 AM UTC

ftxbro wrote: post #37

So the biggest tech companies in the world, now that they are huge, are making their programs faster. OK. To me, that says maybe the reason they beat their competition to becoming huge, was that they wrote a lot of features quickly and didn't nitpick about performance. Maybe the ones that wrote efficient high performance code from the start stayed small or were out-competed.

When I was starting out using the web, one of the reasons for using Google over competition was that it was fast. The home page loaded fairly quickly, and the results were instantaneous. Google spent a lot of time optimizing for performance during its early years and they were explicit about it.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#45

Post by School-Cotton » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:30 AM UTC

Absolutely hilarious and ridiculous to claim that Facebook cares about iOS app performance. In reality they have a few dozen people who care making heroic technical fixes to mitigate the damage of thousands of people adding mountains of mediocre crap to the apps.

If you care about performance from the beginning, you would never even get to the point where you’re saying “oh crap, our messenger app can barely run, let’s rewrite it in C”.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#46

Post by roju_ » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:36 AM UTC

ahtihn wrote: post #42

omnicognate wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a games programmer. He's using examples outside his industry to illustrate that his points aren't specific to games (excuse 4). What industry would you like him to talk about?

B2B SaaS targeting "enterprise" customers. You know the kind where the people making the buying decision aren't users. Does Atlassian look like they care about the performance of their products? Is it a significant factor in their sales? Does the average ERP or CRM system compete on performance?

On the Atlassian blog you can certainly also find posts about improving performance. [1]

[1] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/cloud-performance-up...

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#47

Post by Animats » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:38 AM UTC

Do you want to reduce your compute costs, or improve the user's perceived response time? Those are quite different problems. They're approached in very different ways.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#48

Post by t43562 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:41 AM UTC

globalreset wrote: post #17

Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have. Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding…

I think its usually that their competence is judged from above based on their speed of development as that's the only metric people above them can understand. So quality is ignored and performance is an aspect of quality - many things can be made to perform ok for the demo and the first 100 users.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#49

Post by JanneVee » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:42 AM UTC

Well then further excuses come flying on why he is wrong again, and how performance doesn't matter to them. I have a legacy code base that I until recently worked with that domain specific Business Intelligence product built with SOLID principles. 20% of the processes CPU usage was for the GC, whenever you made a dump of the process it was 99% fragmentation of memory and pointer chasing through object trees every time. The customers complain about performance because they aren't getting their data in a timely manner and not getting the savings they were promised with the product. It is not a game but it does math on a bunch of data and there is a requirement to do it in a timely manner, which it is failing. Stop coming with excuses that it is niche, if you are doing anything useful to the data then you might want to pick up on Caseys advice.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#50

Post by tomgp » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:43 AM UTC

I’ve never seen anyone make the argument that performance is not important. I have seen people make the argument that performance is less imprtant than some other property (maintainability, extensibility, legibility etc. etc.) given certain aims and constraints.