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Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

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Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#21

Post by extraisland »

zeroCalories wrote: post #3

I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.

> Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well

I worked for about 15 years as a frontend developer. I've seen very little evidence of this being the case.

I've seen a huge amount of developers (backend, frontend doesn't matter much) will do things that are really dumb e.g. repeated look of values that don't change often, not trying to minimise roundtrips.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#22

Post by graemep »

Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

> Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line.

I would say (maybe this is what you mean by consideration on"?) that it has an impact on the bottom line, but this is not obvious and not understood by the people in charge.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#23

Post by techdmn »

My personal read on this is that everyone is still trying to recreate the "sudden success" of FAANG-like companies in their start-up phases. (Never mind how long it actually took them to become big.) Basically upper management incentivizes "big bets" that might turn into a "moon shot". Those bets are new features. You'll never get rich quick just by optimizing latency. You might get rich slowly, but how is that going to pump the stock this quarter / get me promoted?

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#24

Post by jerf »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19
jerf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vastly, vastly less than that. Even as expensive as engineers are. And "zero" mistakes is not part of the goal. It clearly wasn't in the requirements during initial development, why would they add it afterwards?

Because, if there is even one mistake; the profit losses from that mistake, could easily eat up the savings. Imagine having to tell management your optimization to save $400K cost $100K in engineer time and caused a $700K outage where the “Add to cart” button sometimes didn’t work. Great job. You’re possibly fired. (Edit: Due to my misreading, add a few digits to the outage cost.)

That's not how you do risk analysis. You're proving too much [1]; you're proving that no company should ever change any working system because something could go wrong.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#25

Post by gjsman-1000 »

jerf wrote: post #24
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, if there is even one mistake; the profit losses from that mistake, could easily eat up the savings. Imagine having to tell management your optimization to save $400K cost $100K in engineer time and caused a $700K outage where the “Add to cart” button sometimes didn’t work. Great job. You’re possibly fired. (Edit: Due to my misreading, add a few digits to the outage cost.)

That's not how you do risk analysis. You're proving too much [1]; you're proving that no company should ever change any working system because something could go wrong. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much

I don’t care if you can justify it in an academic sense; your company’s boardroom is going to say:

- Savings $400K

- Direct expenditures $100K

- Mistake expenditures $700K

- Net loss $400K; immediate loss $800K

And that’s it. You’re fired, replaced with someone who is better at not fixing things that ain’t broken; who wouldn’t have made this mistake in the first place. And heaven help you if your code is deployed before the Nintendo Switch 2 launch (or another major launch) when you made this mistake; or if you just ruined another company’s launch and your company’s contract with them to support it. Pointing to a Wikipedia article, musing about how risk analysis should be done, isn’t going to save your skin.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#26

Post by danielvaughn »

Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

Yep.

Another issue is that you often simply aren’t given the time to make it performant. Deadlines are heavily accelerated for web products. You’re barely allotted time to fix bugs, never mind enhancements.

Most web devs don’t want to make slow sites, they’re not given the opportunity to.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#28

Post by mlinhares »

graemep wrote: post #22
Apreche wrote: post #11

Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. If someone comes to your company and says they want to give them money to buy an advertisement, nobody in power says “no thanks, that will make our website slow.” If someone in marketing says “put this tracking garbage on our site” nobody says “no can do, too slow.” If the designers, or executives looking at the design, are enamored with something really flashy loo…

> Because it’s not a consideration on the bottom line. I would say (maybe this is what you mean by consideration on"?) that it has an impact on the bottom line, but this is not obvious and not understood by the people in charge.

Its always the same reason, the business just doesn't hire people qualified to do the job.

If in 2025 you're not a content farm, your business is to get people to buy stuff from you, you don't have a team tracking every millisecond change in your p99 latency and page load speed across multiple devices, you're just incompetent.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#29

Post by extraisland »

torginus wrote: post #20
zeroCalories wrote: post #3

I agree that the problem is product development, but the framing is wrong. Engineers generally have a solid intuition for what will perform well, but when UX designers and PMs with only a vague idea of how these technologies work dreams up an idea, gives a deadline, then the engineers are evaluated on fulfilling those metrics, then the outcome will be obvious.

I disagree - it's often engineering's fault. It's been pretty consistent that a decently specced server, running PHP that was written sometime last century, generating static pages, redis cache in front, and serving static content via nginx, beats the everloving pants off whatever fotm microservice SPA monstrosity modern devs tend to come up with. The most hilarious if you go to pirate sites (for stuff like comics, m…

A lot of companies seem to architect their web apps to deal with millions of users. When in reality they may have a couple of hundred hitting the site at once.

This explodes the cost of development and it makes current web development miserable IME.

I am forced to deal with everything being totally overengineered when a Flask app with a PostgresSQL backend could probably do the job on a reasonably priced VPS.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#30

Post by azangru »

extraisland wrote: post #27

I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster. They only care about performance issues if it causes a problem . If it does not, they couldn't care less.

> I totally disagree with his conclusion that companies want their website to be faster

But what do web developers want? What do web designers want? Some developers pride themselved on being craftsmen. They would write tests. They would design architectures. Why wouldn't they want websites they are building to be faster?

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