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Comment by FemmeAndroid | Hacker News Reader

It feels like the frustration comes because I see the analogy this way:

The roads have been given extra lanes, and the total possible throughout of the road has increased. As a result, car manufacturers have decided that they can use a cheaper manufacturing process which makes slower cars. But when anyone complains, they point to the additional lanes and say ‘but the number of cars that get from point A to point B has increased, even if each trip is slower.’

The end user isn’t getting a choice when software developers make slower code each year. They have to buy more expensive hardware to keep up with the slowdowns of software developers.

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I get it. But what exactly do you want to happen here?

In terms of your analogy, do you want more expensive cars that less people have?

Software developers could spend more time optimizing their code. But that means that are spending less time elsewhere, fixing bugs, adding features, developing other products.

It should be noted that many times features come in that people do not want.

“The new format bar” for slack and “huddles” (perhaps less antagonisingly) are examples of things that Slack has done seemingly to prove they’re still working on the program.

Despite the the features not being needed in the slightest.

I actually disagree, at least about huddles. Huddles are a direct response to the low-friction nature of Discord voice channels (and arguably Teamspeak/Mumble/etc before Discord, although nothing else married text and voice channels quite as well before Discord.) It's almost silly how small of a difference there is between starting a huddle and a channel-wide "call" - the only difference is that it doesn't start out by "ringing" for everyone in the channel. But that tiny difference completely shifts the feeling from "this is a formal communication" to "we're all just hanging out and you can join if you want but no pressure."

IMO huddles happened because the pandemic moved so many more people remote that the need for a water-cooler replacement became much more obvious.

I mean, we’re programmers here and it’s the easiest damn thing to learn. We could just write the software we like. Scratch our own itch.

I, for one, don’t care that much for performance so my personal forks of projects are all feature oriented.

But if you care about performance this much then writing something high performance is the best way to find others like you.

That would imply that we do less or as much things as before with computers which I think is false. Maybe you don't agree with what everyone does, but that doesn't mean that it's worthless.

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