If stuff is legitimately slow, we should make it faster. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that imo.
This has carried over quite well into my work life. Things like "big O", understanding the mechanics of different kinds of data structures, and their tradeoffs enter all my code. They don't really take up a large part of my active thinking, but I will routinely make decisions that are more performant and try to weigh in readability, "grok"-ability, and if they are common or not.
I find that university forced me to learn the unattractive bits of computing, that if I was self taught I likely would've glossed over and not spent several months on.
Yes, if stuff is legitimately slow, make it faster. But things typically _become slow_, it's a creep. As time progresses, it slows down, now it's slow and you may not have a product manager who thinks _now_ is the time to dedicated resources towards speeding it up.
This is HackerNews. Hating bloated websites is a time-honoured tradition here.
> Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free
It's worth separating these two. Plenty of web developers have computer science degrees, but if they're paid to quickly churn out bloated websites, that's what they'll do.
> Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
If the aim is to improve the performance of software/websites, what's needed is a userbase that's less forgiving of bloat.