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Performance excuses debunked

computerenhance.com

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Re: Performance excuses debunked

#91

Post by asynchronous »

horsawlarway wrote: post #83
AbsoluteCabbage wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that performance is so important to customer satisfaction and the bottom line that even a horrendous company like facebook would begrudgingly spend time and money to improve performance. If anything your comment reinforces his point.

I can rephrase your sentence as: The point is that performance is so far down the list of things to prioritize that [company of choice] made it to [revenue] without having to care at all about it. It wasn't worth them focusing on until they had already acquired a very large marketshare. Only when already large and successful did the scope and complexity of their system impact performance enough to bother focusing on…

This is an extremely sensible take in a lake of “you’re just a bad programmer” comments.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#92

Post by onion2k »

roju_ wrote: post #46
ahtihn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To be fair, going from 30s to load a page to 20s is a huge improvement.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#93

Post by mamcx »

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).

I have worked for +20 years for small companies. A "small" here in colombia is smaller than in US.

You could say that are the targets for "not care for performance"... and they ARE. *A LOT*.

One of my main competitive advantages? Speed. I work on niches were my app has 2/3 reports and my competitors +300, and the users use my app instead. Like, for example, a query instead of using +20 minutes work in 6 sec(1).

Mind you: That was before I do Rust, and start pay more care about performance. Long ago!

(1) Today I tried to hit the <1sec. Still could be better. But like this post say, many other stuff also need to be better so have the balance across the broad is challenging.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#94

Post by onion2k »

li4ick wrote: post #87

You know, reading these comments is absolutely hilarious. It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer. That's it. No, you're not capable of making something twice as fast if only you cared or had the time. If you haven't done it as a constant exercise, you can't.

you're an incompetent programmer

The problem with this line of reasoning, eg "if you write slow code you're incompetent", is that it applies to everything that programmers do - if you write slow code you're incompetent, if you write buggy code you're incompetent, if you write undocumented code you're incompetent, if you write untested code you're incompetent, if you write code slowly you're incompetent, if you write code that doesn't fulfil all the requirements perfectly you're incompetent, and so on for each and every measure someone dreams up to measure how good code is.

You'll very quickly find there are no competent developers.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#95

Post by lesuorac »

asynchronous wrote: post #89
li4ick wrote: post #87

You know, reading these comments is absolutely hilarious. It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer. That's it. No, you're not capable of making something twice as fast if only you cared or had the time. If you haven't done it as a constant exercise, you can't.

The sentiment here and in most of industry is: “and that doesn’t matter.”

The general problem though is that "and that doesn't matter" isn't backed up by anything but gut feeling.

When FB dove into the numbers, they found they could save 50% in hardware costs. That _does_ matter.

It may be the case that your company has a 20k server rack to support 20M of sales and so it doesn't matter. But unless you've actually looked up the cost you shouldn't be making the claim because it's unbacked; it's just a bad faith arguement.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#96

Post by mavhc »

lesuorac wrote: post #95
asynchronous wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentiment here and in most of industry is: “and that doesn’t matter.”

The general problem though is that "and that doesn't matter" isn't backed up by anything but gut feeling. When FB dove into the numbers, they found they could save 50% in hardware costs. That _does_ matter. It may be the case that your company has a 20k server rack to support 20M of sales and so it doesn't matter. But unless you've actually looked up the cost you shouldn't be making the claim because it's unbacked; i…

Also depends mostly on your size.

The cost to rewrite your system to be twice as fast is about the same if you have 20k of hardware costs or 20M, but one saves 10k and the other 10M. Only one offsets the cost of the programmers

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#97

Post by li4ick »

onion2k wrote: post #94
li4ick wrote: post #87

You know, reading these comments is absolutely hilarious. It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer. That's it. No, you're not capable of making something twice as fast if only you cared or had the time. If you haven't done it as a constant exercise, you can't.

you're an incompetent programmer The problem with this line of reasoning, eg "if you write slow code you're incompetent", is that it applies to everything that programmers do - if you write slow code you're incompetent, if you write buggy code you're incompetent, if you write undocumented code you're incompetent, if you write untested code you're incompetent, if you write code slowly you're incompetent, if you write…

I mean, sure, this comment sounds nice on a web forum, but some of us have 0 hesitance bucketing others on a scale of competence. Looking at the state of software I interact with on a daily basis, I really don't care about being nice anymore.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#98

Post by robby_w_g »

li4ick wrote: post #87

You know, reading these comments is absolutely hilarious. It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer. That's it. No, you're not capable of making something twice as fast if only you cared or had the time. If you haven't done it as a constant exercise, you can't.

> It's because of this and that, hundreds of excuses that dance around the simple truth: you're an incompetent programmer.

Classic arrogance and naivety from a Casey follower. Name call all you want, you can't hand wave the reality that the business determines the requirements, and in my industry they don't care about performance until it's a noticeable problem. Oh and the requirements they gave you are solving problem X when they really want to solve problem Y, so your optimal solution to problem X needs to be deleted.

I write correct, readable code as performant as it can be in the time I'm allotted. Call me incompetent, but it's what I'm hired to do.

All this bickering and harsh feelings are stemming from the author's inability to understand that different industries have different priorities.

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#99

Post by theptip »

Ironically, this article sets up a strawman of people who claim performance NEVER matters, and then rants long windedly in a tone suggesting it always matters.

My general principle: don’t give uni-directional advice when optimizing a u-shaped loss function.

I usually find that those failing to advocate the nuanced position “you can spend too much AND too little time on perf, here is how to prioritize” are not adding useful information to the conversation.

The truth is, most startups don’t need to worry much about perf. It’s a feature that your customers don’t usually ask for at first. At the other end of the scale, giant companies invest huge sums in taming performance. And your own situation will have more parameters than just that one simplified spectrum.

Measure ROI honestly, and prioritize accordingly!

Re: Performance excuses debunked

#100

Post by yxhuvud »

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).

It is certainly a strong argument that "move fast and break things" create a lot of code that needs to be rewritten.
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