Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

Microsoft does not put it's good programmers on its consumer-grade products, because Microsoft does not respect it's consumers.

Microsoft puts its real talent on its customer-grade products, like Azure and SaaS. That's where they make real money, so that's where they send real talent. The only exception right now might be copilot, which will never make money... But they say that's where they're putting their best and brightest. Then again, they're probably spending billions of CPU hours to generate millions of unique disclaimers and pleasantries - when they could instead use a simple look up table to efficiently weed-out the most common/worthless prompts. That isn't the big-brain design innovation that you'd normally expect from top talent. It's not even baseline acceptable from anybody who actually knows the first thing about how computers work, really. They would rather spend 10 billion dollars on a single computer than to prioritize optimization. Its weird.

But do you want an electronics engineer who understands "instructions", "addresses", "registers", "clocks" and even knows why a pointer works? Or do you want a modern CS major who can use a template to quickly crank out non-scalable apps in a software factory? These skills are mutually exclusive.

Early days of Plasma 5 definitely can be described this way. Although I think we all forget just how fucking ugly early gnome 3 was.

But since mid Plasma 5 and on, it's incredibly stable and consistent in design. At this point, more consistent than gnome.

Didn’t have to, prod benchmarked it for us, twice.

If you’re curious, the EBS disks Aurora uses for temporary storage, when faced with a QD of approximately 240, can manage approximately 5000 IOPS. This was an r6i.32xlarge.

My hypothesis is currently that the massive context switching the CPU had to do to handle the interrupts slowed down its acceptance of new connections / processing other queries enough such that everything piled up. I’ve no idea what kind of core pinning / isolation AWS does under the hood, but CPU utilization from disk I/O alone, according to Enhanced Monitoring, was about 20%.

It’s not about programs being multithreaded. It’s about computers running multiple programs at once on different threads and they all perform well.

One can write software that uses the CPU cache in non-dumb ways no matter how many threads your program has. You can craft your structs so that they take less space in RAM, meaning you can fit more in cache at once. You can have structs of arrays instead of arrays of structs if that helps your application. Few people think of things like this today, they just go for the most naive implementation possible so that the branch predictor can’t work well and everything needs to be fetched from RAM every time instead of building things so that the branch predictor and the cache are helping you instead of impeding you. People just do the bare minimum so that the PM says the card is complete and they never think of it again. It’s depressing.

The tools to write fast software are at our fingertips, already installed on our computers. And I have had zero success in getting people to believe that they should develop with performance in mind.

I’ve worked with both (I personally have an unrelated BS and an MS in SWE, which I used purely to get my foot in the door – it worked), and IMO if someone has a BS, not MS, there’s a decent chance they at least understand DS&A, probably took an OS course, etc.

That said, I have also worked with brilliant people who had no formal education in the subject whatsoever, they just really, really liked it.

I’m biased towards ops because that’s what I do and like, but at least in that field, the single biggest green flag I’ve found is whether or not someone has a homelab. People can cry all they want about “penalizing people for having hobbies outside of their job,” but it’s pretty obvious that if you spend more time doing something – even moreso if you enjoy it – you will learn it at a much faster rate than someone who only does it during business hours.