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Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

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Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#171

Post by trog »

ninkendo wrote: post #119
itsoktocry wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> go on a PM-centric feature frenzy Do developers have any agency whatsoever, or are they at the mercy of doing whatever their managers suggest (while always knowing the "right" answer, of course)? Does our industry attract people who avoid accountability? Fraud? It's the executive's fault. Business struggling? It's the MBA's fault. Bad product? It's the PM's fault. Must be nice!

They have very little agency. Priorities are driven by OKR’s, which require measurability as one of the core tenants. If you want to accomplish something, you must be able to point at a number somewhere, and have a plan to make it to up and to the right. Refactorings to pay down tech debt rarely can pass as OKR’s unless there is a true business need. This is a feature, not a bug, as far as management is concerned. Th…

Your post sort of boils down to me as "be annoying and measure stuff all the time" or "hope you get lucky". I think there's a middle ground in there but it's too easy to err on one side or the other ad a methodology and then get stuck - either you're ruled by OKRs and playing games with metrics and juking the stats all day, or you're shooting blindly in the dark with no direction or accountabilities.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#172

Post by wmil »

xyst wrote: post #118
mnw21cam wrote: post #116

That's great. Now do one on why Microsoft Teams grinds away with 100% CPU on my laptop for a few minutes just to bring up my calendar, or why Outlook on Android freezes for a minute or so when looking at a single small email.

Microsoft Teams is so awful. Between the subpar audio and video quality, and performance issues with basic chat. The experience all around is awful. I wish my company would use something else but the CIO is hellbent on “rEdUcInG tHe nUmBeR oF tOoLs” and MS was apparently throwing in teams for “free” as part of o365 sub.

IT departments like to controll all app permissions using just Active Directory because it simplfies their lives.

Teams uses Active Directory, and they can argue it's "good enough".

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#173

Post by wmil »

dangus wrote: post #153
hbn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware. I mean you're not wrong that install size != slow performance, but GTA5 is a funny example for being the game that had 6 minute loading screens to start online mode until someone reverse engineered it and found it was mostly from parsing a giant 10MB JSON blob, and reduced the loading time by 70% with…

I forgot about that incident! I guess a better example would have been Baldur’s Gate 3. Perhaps it’s still a decent little business lesson: the highest earning video game of all time had an egregious loading bug and nobody cared for years.

I'm suspicious that long initial loads and things like login queues are actually an advantage.

The user doesn't want to end there session until they are sure that they won't want to play for the next hour. They might quit a fast loading game after 15 minutes because it's so easy to start again when they want to.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#174

Post by pcl »

gruez wrote: post #113
pcl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Flights does this. It’s so frustrating. It displays prices in local currency, no matter how many times you go to the menu and pick a currency. And it always uses local calendar alignment, which is “fun”.

>It displays prices in local currency, no matter how many times you go to the menu and pick a currency. Works fine for me, including when I'm in a foreign country and I need to change back to my home currency. Are you sure you're not disabling cookies or whatever?

Nope — happens when I’m logged into my Google account even. I’m sure I decline whatever cookie notifications they throw at me (except when some dark patten tricks me), but in any case, that sort of behavior shouldn’t be governed by any privacy-concerning cookies.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#175

Post by screamingninja »

WJW wrote: post #96
actionfromafar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they know, though? If the download times out, does LinkedIn care or notice?

Surely they'd at least notice a decrease in installations of the new "too big to download" version?

> Surely they'd at least notice a decrease in installations of the new "too big to download" version?

You are referring to a hypothetical scenario where A/B testing took place.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#176

Post by Ringz »

rvba wrote: post #69
YouWhy wrote: post #14

TL;DR: There're few global incentives for a LinkedIn app developer to make an overall good app, as opposed to making their PM happy. In detail: This is how death by a thousand papercuts looks like. I've had the (dubious) pleasure of observing a roughly similar BigTech app project. There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app, and they are likely under immense pressure to Just Ship Alread…

1) where are the architects? Arent they supposed to deal with such issues? 2) nobody measures such metrics: size, bloat, speed... 3) where are the code reviews? 4) nobody checks if the same library, same icon pack are not attached twice? 5) 1000 people? What do they even do? I suspect a lot of slides, politics and "high visibility projects" Meanwhile the product suffers. Companies sure talk a lot about ecology, then…

> Not related to Libkedin, but what is the carbon footprint of all electron-based apps that take hundreds of megabytes and gigantic amount of processor time?

Whether the CO2 footprint is high or low (and I assume it is very high), the real problem is that it would be a very simple way to improve CO2 efficiency.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#177

Post by carlmr »

murkt wrote: post #35
zogrodea wrote: post #13

I'm probably not the only person who misinterpreted "gig" in the title as "job", as in "side gig", instead of "gigabytes" as was intended. (Makes sense considering LinkedIn is about jobs, but "half a side gig" makes no sense which should have been a clue.)

You’re definitely not the only one. I expected a rambling about how some not very sane person spends half of their working hours on LinkedIn, constantly updating their profile and whatnot.

Me, too, especially if they're looking for gig work on LinkedIn, and management of LinkedIn takes up more time than expected for that.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#178

Post by gruez »

pcl wrote: post #174
gruez wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It displays prices in local currency, no matter how many times you go to the menu and pick a currency. Works fine for me, including when I'm in a foreign country and I need to change back to my home currency. Are you sure you're not disabling cookies or whatever?

Nope — happens when I’m logged into my Google account even. I’m sure I decline whatever cookie notifications they throw at me (except when some dark patten tricks me), but in any case, that sort of behavior shouldn’t be governed by any privacy-concerning cookies.

> I’m sure I decline whatever cookie notifications they throw at me (except when some dark patten tricks me),

Okay I retested with a EU VPN and I can confirm it's due to you declining the cookies. If you decline cookies and change currencies, it adds your desired currency to the url as a query parameter, so if you navigate to flights.google.com again you lose it.

>but in any case, that sort of behavior shouldn’t be governed by any privacy-concerning cookies.

In other words:

you: "don't store cookies and data about me"

google: "ok, we won't store cookies and data about you"

you: "why didn't you store my currency?"

Actually if you read the cookie prompt that you declined, it specifically mentions that they use cookies for "personalization" purposes, and that if you decline they will not use cookies for that purpose. Storing your desired currency arguably counts as "personalization" purposes, so I don't really see the issue here.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#179

Post by djmips »

signaru wrote: post #117
osrec wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but in my experience, this is often what happens when you have too many cooks. People like to build corporate empires by having more subordinates. Those subordinates need to justify their existence somehow. Bloated, inefficient software is one of the unfortunate outcomes.

It's like Parkinson's law, but extended to other resources besides time, like capital.

Similar to Myhrvold's laws #1

https://blog.codinghorror.com/software-its-a-gas/

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#180

Post by ninkendo »

trog wrote: post #171
ninkendo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have very little agency. Priorities are driven by OKR’s, which require measurability as one of the core tenants. If you want to accomplish something, you must be able to point at a number somewhere, and have a plan to make it to up and to the right. Refactorings to pay down tech debt rarely can pass as OKR’s unless there is a true business need. This is a feature, not a bug, as far as management is concerned. Th…

Your post sort of boils down to me as "be annoying and measure stuff all the time" or "hope you get lucky". I think there's a middle ground in there but it's too easy to err on one side or the other ad a methodology and then get stuck - either you're ruled by OKRs and playing games with metrics and juking the stats all day, or you're shooting blindly in the dark with no direction or accountabilities.

Or you can trust your engineers to know where the quality issues are (they live in the code base all day) and trust that when they say fixing something is important, and that they can make a logical case for it, that it should mean something.

Quality doesn’t come from metrics, it comes from giving a shit.

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