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Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

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Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#51

Post by extraisland »

azangru wrote: post #30
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?

Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably.

A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI.

So even if you are a craftsmen, your colleagues aren't. They will never care, they have no incentive to, because management doesn't care.

I've totally given up with it and I can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#52

Post by bluGill »

mlinhares wrote: post #28
graemep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Businesses do hire people qualified for the job in general. However they have lots of different jobs with different qualifications needed and so they have lots of different qualifications in play.

I'm not an accountant so if I do something that negatively affects accountants I won't find out - unless what I do shows up in an audit. My company has put things in place so that it is unlikely I would accidentally do something that would show up in an audit (most of them are best practices that every company has). I do have a company credit card, and I can make other purchases on behalf of my company - but if I tried to send my brother in law a million dollars I doubt I could do that (not that I would)

As web engineers what do you have in place so that if someone who competent in a different area does something in the web area and breaks things will will notice and stop them?

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#53

Post by tossandthrow »

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.

If that is the case, it should be almost trivial to write up a paper that quantifies the cost of poor performance and executives ymwouldnlove to read it.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#54

Post by sgarland »

Because the idea of DX was invented, and devs now clutch to it like it’s the last life preserver on a sinking ship.

“If you normalize your schema, it will be 20x smaller, and you’ll eliminate an entire class of bugs.”

“Hmm, but then we’ll have to write joins in the query, so we’ll pass.”

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#55

Post by bluGill »

robviren wrote: post #44

What am I gonna do, leave my bank because the website loaded slow? Get tickets through some other option? Order differ food because it took 10 seconds to load a menu? I hate the slow web so much, but it just gets lost in the churn of life. I'd just as soon not buy something because the logo was silly or they have weeds growing in their side walk. I respect a well engineered site but most don't.

I have ordered from someone else at times. I've given up on websites and payed 5x the price to a local store because their web site was so slow. It is really hard to track sales that you don't because the customer went elsewhere.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#56

Post by jpdb »

Web performance is probably/mostly valued as efficiently as it needs to be.

The numbers mentioned in the article are...quite egregious.

> Oh, Just 2.4 Megabytes. Out of a chonky 4 MB payload. Assuming they could rebuild the site to hit Alex Russell's target of 450 KB, that's conservatively $435,000,000 per year. Not too bad. And this is likely a profound underestimation of the real gain

This is not a "profound underestimation." Not by several orders of magnitude. Kroger is not going save anywhere even remotely close to $435 million dollars by reducing their js bundle size.

Kroger had $3.6-$3.8 billion in allocated capex in the year of 2024. There is no shot javascript bundle size is ~9% of their *total* allocated capex.

I work with a number of companies of similar size and their entire cloud spend isn't $435,000,000 -- and bandwidth (or even networking all up) isn't in their time 10 line items.

A leak showed that Walmart spent $580m a year on Azure: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/walmart-spent-580...

These numbers are so insanely inflated, I think the author needs to rethink their entire premise.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#57

Post by bluGill »

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.

The problem is the problems are hard to measure. How do you know that "Joe" bought from someone else because the competitors website just "felt better". We know from UX research how speed affects how things feel. We know that customers will go elsewhere at times. We also know not everyone who visits your site will buy. I know statisticians have tools to measure the loss, but I'm not able to tell you how they do it or how accurate they are (they can give you a range).

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#58

Post by danielvaughn »

mwcz wrote: post #31
danielvaughn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They aren't given the opportunity to, that's true. We've also been in an industry-wide performance drought for so many years that many devs don't even realize how fast websites can be.

Yep. I recently ran an experiment where I tried appending elements to a list in rapid succession. One with near-native JS and another with React. The former was about 40 times faster.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#59

Post by bluGill »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bef…

If mistakes cost that much you need something in place to prevent them anyway. Because I guarantee that eventually you will need some change made (tax laws change?) and you then get that same risk.

Re: Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

#60

Post by azangru »

extraisland wrote: post #51
azangru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Management doesn't care about it being crafted nicely. They want a ROI. Often it isn't easy for them to see the benefit of something being more performant, or looking better. It doesn't matter to them as often they won't ever use these systems. It just needs to function acceptably. A huge number of places are not data-driven. Therefore it is difficult to show in anyway that improving service speed will improve ROI. S…

Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?

> I've totally given up with it and I've can write fast JS code. I just don't get rewarded for it. In fact it has be a detriment to my career.

Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money.

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