The size is correlated to the number of engineers working on it.
give each engineer a budget of 256 bytes
You are onto something
Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
181–190 of 205 posts
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking from experience in a similarly unhealthily large org: > 1) where are the architects? Arent they supposed to deal with such issues? The architects are the ones being told “we need these features, figure out how to do it”, and they build little box charts and sequence diagrams to sort out which systems are responsible for which. Never mind if a “feature” could just be a few functions somewhere. Architects thin…
This was incredibly well written and I really enjoyed it. Never worked for a large org but if I extrapolate stuff I've seen in smaller places I can see how this would be the end result.
>if I extrapolate stuff I've seen in smaller places
Makes me wonder where they got their ideas, maybe they are just imitating larger companies.
It's real bad when you get a refugee from a large bureaucratic org into any key position somewhere much smaller that would really need to grow a lot to compare at all.
Ultimate decision-makers sometimes think that type of overpaid climber will prepare them to grow to the size of the company they once worked at. When the opposite is true because they thrive on the bureaucracy more than the business, and can barely perform when all that overgrown bureaucracy is not there at their disposal.
And you don't want to pattern your company like a large bureaucracy until it is actually large. And then only deploy the bureaucracy part judiciously when and if it becomes absolutely necessary, no reason to do it the 19th century way any more.
From another comment:
>Sounds like bad product management as much as bad engineering. I mean, the outcome — a bloated product — is bad for everyone: the users in the first place, the engineers building the product, but also the PM who can't conceivably be proud of shipping a bad product.
"Bless their hearts, they don't know any better."
"This is why we can't have good things."
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber actually had a pretty reasonable explanation for their app being huge when their rather large app size made the rounds several years ago. Turns out localization takes a lot of space. I wonder how much of LinkedIn’s insane size can be attributed to that vs just lazy coding
> Turns out localization takes a lot of space. Does localization involve more than a few hundred strings per locale, all of which should compress really well? Maybe add in some localized icon sets, but much fewer than the number of supported locales. I'm not saying you're (or they're) wrong, I'm genuinely curious.
The simple example I gave in a sibling comment is that in India you have the option to call a tuktuk or a scooter which has a whole different guide set, flow, more screens. And lots of different airport specific, town specific, county specific, country specific regulations about things that need to be shown, taxes, etc. For all of that to be seamlessly available as you travel you need to be downloading a pretty large bundle upfront. Else you end up in a situation where you need the service’s reliability the most (travelling in a foreign country) and not being able to use it easily (because you have crappier data from bad infrastructure or a cheap SIM card and can’t download a location specific bundle)
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
The app may do a lot of things, but what fraction of users use all of the things? Even if I use 10% of what an app is capable of, I still have to store 100% of the app on my phone.
So what? What negative impact does storing the app on your phone have in your life?
I see the effect most with friends/family who aren't that technical wondering what to do when their phones run out of space. I don't think they expect that the most effective way to free up space is to delete a handful of apps, and instead they go through hundreds of photos trying to free up 5 MB at a time.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially when everything's on 2 week sprint cycles, and all of those new features are rushed. We can refactor later!
We're not doing waterfall, but we're going to plan out every little detail of a change into small parts and plan out how many sprints it should take to do them all and split that work across the team so that you are always relying on someone else's work or somebody is waiting on you to start something.
Literally described my workplace, and it won't change b/c everyone wants to game theory the wrong way to make themself look like a 'team player' (I hate that term)
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#186The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.
On android there is a way for apps to initially provide a barebones package, that downloads and installs quickly, but that then fully downloaded itself afterwards. So I guess there already has been some engineering effort, just not in making sure apps are small
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#187Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#188The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.
On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline…
^^ This. Companies often don't care about app size, because the (potential) users that avoid their app for size and/or performance reasons, are not the ones with the fat wallets (or valueable data).
Read: company doesn't care about including a large % of potential audience. It only cares about including the users that are most easily turned into profit.
P.S.: maybe those companies are right. But it also means they're fishing in a small & crowded pond. There's a lot of untapped market out there if only a company would care to cater to it.
P.S.2: Things change, and people's circumstances change. Today's 'useless' user could be your company's most valueable asset tomorrow. Get 'm while you can.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you use firefox mobile, there's a toggle switch under the menu to set "Desktop Version", I have found it prevents these intentional mobile degraded sites.
Although "Desktop version" is also tied to a desktop viewport, so you have to deal with either too tiny font sizes or lots of scrolling.
Because god forbid tech companies actually build compliant and responsive web sites!
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just PMs though: developers are forced into resume driven development by hiring practices. If they stick to the toolkit already established in the app they set themselves up for a career trajectory towards Uber driver. The risk of knowing only what was fashionable five years ago is just too big.
> It's not just PMs though: developers are forced into resume driven development by hiring practices I was laid off from my last gig in January because the company was running out of money. Last week I saw a former coworker share how excited they were to turn a perfectly functional and internal website built with html and css into a react app with redux and nextjs. I couldn’t believe a company running out of money wo…
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