51–60 of 193 posts
Other times, that performance loss was actually an intentional trade-off for accessibility, security, reliability, or other tangible benefits. I'm sure not everyone will agree, but in most cases I will personally prioritize those ahead of performance.
A lot of the older simpler software we think of as being high performance was, or still is, severely lacking in those aspects.
I'm not convinced this is true and not just a popular argument. Just today I've processed 4 TB of JSON data, in Python, on a desktop computer. That would be crazy to imagine 10 years ago. Yes, many cores, fast SSD, etc. Maybe it should be 20 TB if ultra optimized, but the capability advance is incredible. Yes, apps maybe start slowly, but now everybody can easily edit HD video on their mid-range laptop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it the devs who need to ride the Corollas? Or is it the managers and/or the testers?
Have testers not suffered enough?! It's the devs that need the slow machines -- they're in the tightest feedback loop, and directly empowered to optimize performance.
In other words, the business should have ultimate authority and responsibility to structure incentives and pursue priorities. Up until the engineer crosses over a boundary and becomes part of leadership.
I know why, but it does seem like an unreasonable usage.
Here's the thing: I'd be okay with my "primary" software to be resource intensive. In my case, that's my IDE and the surrounding tools supporting it. I don't want my supporting software (Slack, Spotify, etc) to be taking a ton of resource. But everyone thinks their software is worth the memory usage. That ends up leaving us with Spotify actively taking 300ish MB of RAM to play music I could play off of VLC instead.
Who this really hurts are the users that's don't want to spend a lot on their machines. A lot of us devs have powerful and nice machines because it's a clear value win for us to do so, but then tons of users suffer because you're not even realizing you're writing insanely suboptimal code.
The amount of times I've seen things that abuse network traffic to is insane. Everytime I see some SQL in a loop that should be a single query, a piece of me dies.
This is probably just a natural thing we're experiencing with software development though, and I don't expect it to go away. The best we can do is to write better software and review our peer's code as well.
I've been saying for a while now, that developers and their managers should use a low-spec machine, let's say the 5th-percentile of whatever their users are using in the field, at least one day a week. This might force some reprioritizing of performance and efficiency goals. As long as devs spend their days with bugattis while writing software for corollas, this will continue to get worse.
Giving bad tools to any professional is a bad idea for productivity. We have other ways of checking if software is slow.
It is all a question of company priorities as there are no professional standards whatsoever established. And companies ofc go for spend the least they can get away with.