In ~2006 I was working in tech support and we moved from a snappy homegrown ticketing system to one where tabbing out of each field took ~5. We all hated it and complained immediately, but the contract was signed and we weren't able to influence management. Evidence for "Customers aren’t the clients" and "People don’t decide on satisfaction".
Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
201–210 of 280 posts
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth All you need to do to prove to yourself how bad things have gotten is to find an old PC (or VM) and load up a copy of Windows XP. The amount of bullshit between mouse click & updated photons arriving back at your eyeballs is insane in 2023. Software used to be much faster than me. Now, it is significantly slower. The only things that are r…
Having spent years and years with visual studio, I can guarantee it didn't function like that on the computers of the time with the typical software/driver load. He's running that on a VM that is vastly faster than what you could get at the time.
Running Visual C++ 6 long past its prime was qiote a nice experience, before I had to switch to VS2005. Sure was nice to be able to have for-loop variables not spill out the loop scope but it was depressing as hell to see a very nice and responsive machine keel over.
Spending hours upon hours every day getting an app snappier and snappier and watching the VS hog making everything so slow and sad.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#203People care about performance and reliability when there is more than one way to do the thing they want to do. The slowest, most inefficient solution is (depending on the value of solving the problem) better than no solution at all.
Alternate (and I think more accurate) phrasing: people tolerate bad performance and low reliability when there is no viable alternative tool that does the things they need.
As is usually the case - software, particularly SaaS, resists commoditization. For almost any piece of software you may be using (and I am counting things like social media platforms or e-commerce sites in this), there is no equivalent substitute you could switch to on short notice. Often there's literally none at all. When there is, the effort to migrate your data tends to be prohibitive.
Also, in my phrasing, I wrote "need" instead of your "want". From my observations, almost all interactions regular people have with software are out of necessity, in the sense that they're forced to use it to get what they want, and they have no power to change it.
Examples:
- Software your employer tells you to use at work, which sometimes is quite horrible, thanks to magic of enterprise sales.
- Software your government tells you to use to submit various forms related to taxes, healthcare, childcare, business, social services, etc. This sometimes manages to not be all that bad.
- Software your daycare suddenly forces you to use to communicate with their staff and access CCTV feeds. Software you can't ignore because absence reporting and invoicing goes through it too. Software that's hot garbage, surveillance capitalism optimized mobile app with no web version, created by some bullshit startup with lots of VC funding, which explains why, out of a sudden, every single daycare started to switch to it, despite the app being extremely limited, having abysmal ergonomics, discriminating against people who aren't glued to their smartphones, and likely violating GDPR in more than one way.
I guess you can tell I'm a bit bitter about that last one.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was br…
Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
Company: "IT is terrible at their jobs, what are we going to do about this!"
IT director: "Give me a budget to hire competent IT people"
Company: "On the other hand, we're ok with this IT incompetence"
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was br…
Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
Interesting, in my experience generally it's business types that don't know shit from their elbow and don't include IT early enough due to negligence.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#206"apex predator of grug is complexity complexity bad say again: complexity very bad you say now: complexity very, very bad" https://grugbrain.dev/ No really -- I would bet that the single greatest contribution comes from the massive growth in complexity, in all relevant areas, over the last 20+ years.
Some of the complexity is, unfortunately, introduced by grugs, because complexity smarter than grug and sometimes pretend is simple.
Couple months back, I read an article that made a bold claim: that the old wisdom saying most software is IO-bound stopped being true some time ago; instead, most software nowadays is CPU-bound, typically on parsing JSON.
JSON is something that may seem simple to grug, particularly a webdev grug. So simple that they'll use it for structuring and exchanging data everywhere. But while on the API side it seems simple, actual JSON parsers and serializers are quite complex, and the format itself expensive to parse and wasteful[0]. All that complexity gets silently embedded into everything, and the overhead at runtime is paid at nearly every step and nearly every level of software stacks, even though most of it isn't even needed.
That's the failure mode of grug understanding of simplicity. Sometimes a little more effort up front yields much lower total complexity.
(Also, eliminating complexity is good. Shifting complexity from developers to users is criminal.)
--
[0] - It's better than XML in most scenarios, especially scenarios in which neither of them should be used in the first place.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?
At one point I wore a hat in a IT leadership role for factories. We hated third party software because it created silo's where our data became un-usable. There is no point in an MRP/ERP factory system if all the bits aren't talking/working together. People fight and fight you as you try to get there, but once you get there and it all starts to work together and you no longer have jobs travelers looking like daisies w…
Was that last sentence autocorrected maybe? I'm struggling to parse the last bit about travellers and daisies.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#208People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior. Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation. At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected. And I've he…
100% work at another big-ish tech company on the networking stack and every time we decrease latency, we usually see an increase in traffic as more page loads succeed. It's still quite hard to make the case to PMs and business leaders that there's more latent demand left for our product at lower latency levels, but it's also hard to quantify that extra traffic into revenue vs costs of latency decreasing.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#209In my experience it's less about what the end user does or doesn't want, but more about what the company can or cannot sell. That is why new features are the priority, because once a feature is complete, there is a clock on how long you can sell it. The problem, of course, is the that the market is usually 95% saturated from the existing customer based. So the gain is incremental at best as a few extra customers filter in now that the new feature is available, and then the race is on to find a new thing to tempt in new customers.
Reliability and performance doesn't matter to people who are chasing sales (which is most of a company, not just the sales team, because that's how company success is measured). Retention is someone else's job, and so the focus will always be on churning out more and more feature that can boost sales.
Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was br…
Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
I would guess that completely incompetent IT departments that only degrades everybody's work are very highly correlated to workplaces that use those huge, all in 1, hired consultants based software packages.