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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

In my observation, this puts the blame in the wrong place. It's simply that most software development is feature-driven, and efficiency is rarely held to be a feature by the business that's paying for them. That is, until it becomes a problem, at which point there are enough low-hanging fruit left by the constant scramble for user-facing shiny that making it not a problem again is relatively straightforward.

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I didn't buy that excuse at all. Devs have a habitual problem blaming others for their poor code.

Often better code takes only marginally longer or even less time since you aren't having to deal with all the extra complexity that tends to be a part of "modern" development.

The complexity is of our own making. We spend too much time on this extra cool and extensible way to use json and xml in case we even want to run on a quantum computer in in 50 years or avoid a simple recompilation when we need to change a constant that will likely never need to be changed when we should have been spending that time on more important things.

You're conflating "better" with "more efficient to execute." That's only one possible interpretation of "better", and it's usually not the most important one.

but it very often is. If you're a web developer, for example, little matters more to your users than performance. This has been demonstrated an almost infinite number of times by now, but surprisingly few industry professionals seem to pay any attention to it

Yes, and we can point that out to our business owners until we're blue in the face, but until they see the benefit they won't pay us to do that work. It can be surprisingly difficult to get this point across.

Just because something matters objectively, doesn't mean it matters to the client/business (at the moment). And unless you as the developer are in the position to dictate that, sometimes you're at the mercy of non-technical requirements or demands. You can be right about everything, but unless you're the boss, at least sometimes you can only do what you're told.

Little matters more to your users than performance, specifically, only features and security matter more than performance :)

And that the software is available (ie actually shipped). And to use it they need to know it exists and what it's for, which usually involves some marketing.

I think it unfortunately takes experience to write efficient code the first time around. Experience people are not gaining, since there is little to no focus on performance outside embedded and gamedev circles.

Well for some reason it's those people [1] who have the money so they call the shots.

Do you know of organizations where an internal drive for excellence is cultivated? Where technical people communicate directly across hierarchy levels and horizontally? Maybe even outside the company?

[1]: People who are relatively close to the customer and not the implementation. Those people don't tend to understand how efficient some things are because they can't estimate how long something should take from lower principles which they have a benchmark for. This makes them much happier software users.

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