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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

Eh. If one wants to play the blame game, we can be here all day. The marketing dept asking to add sharing widgets are to blame. The team lead pushing for Squarespace so they can get away hiring junior devs under them is to blame. The frontend dev using half of the React ecosystem on a static site + simple form is to blame. The designer insisting on huge eye candy images is to blame. The UX person set on adding a carousel is to blame. The project manager prioritizing feature count is to blame. Etc etc etc.

The bottom line is that nobody really has any strong incentives to advocate for performance, so it falls by the sidelines.

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Maybe the users are too blame as they measurably prefer websites with modern UX and don't really care about latency over a few hundred milliseconds.

Not really. People are forced to use many products of big companies and others which are largely responsible for this.

If your school uses gsuite (which they likely will given free stuff and integration), you can't choose not to use gsuite.

> People are forced to use many products of big companies and others which are largely responsible for this.

Same way as dev employees are forced by companies to prioritise features over optimisation.

I don't think there's really a problem with a couple 100ms of latency for web services. However, what often happens, is that "modern" websites take many seconds to actually do simple operations which is clearly horrible design.

I literally despise new UX of gmail, Ive switched to html version simply because I dont need the bloat crap they try to push at me while checking mailbox...

Yet they keep on adding more and more crap, soon Gmail is going to load for over a minute..

> The frontend dev using half of the React ecosystem on a static site + simple form is to blame.

I once saw a website that took a full minute to load, and it was literally a page with images, text overflowing around it, and then some download links. But the way it was built... my god, the way it was built.

That company brought in a new "CTO", and his solution was to dump the entire thing in google cloud. I shit you not, this CTO initially installed an EOL version of PHP, and when errors started happening, he started submitting PR's to revert the PHP code to be compatible with the EOL version of PHP.

Dumpster Fire.

This is just insane.. yet I completely believe you..

The question is why did he need that specific php version? Was there something that required it and if so could that be isolated?

That's what he figured to install, probably...

Been there, done that, have scars.

His explanation is that's what google cloud defaulted too, although I have a really hard time believing that.

I'm more inclined to believe he googled and blindly followed an old guide with an old ppa than I am to believe that google cloud by default installed an EOL PHP server.

I'm pretty sure he was a node guy who found himself in the PHP world.

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