Talented people are found everywhere, but hopefully someone with authority over them doesn’t slowly poison the drive out of them.
Companies are successful not because they delight every customer consistently, but because they do just enough to make the customer spend money with them.
After all, I will still buy the next version.
That said given the quality of what they have put out, I'd surmise the issue here is morelikely they don't feel the same pain on load times?
Bandwidth too good, rigs too powerful, dev envs overpowered, etc. to enable developer velocity can often also mask real world problems.
Hell, even hot reload can mean you don't see load as often and are able to easily rationalize as "not that big a deal" - I wouldn't necessarily take it as a sign they are not deeply invested in their craft.
One of the things that I've instituted at my work is our methodology for acquiring test phones for our product (WhatsApp for hospitals, basically). We go to a supermarket and buy the most eye-catching box of the budget phones available in the phone aisle.
We've squashed so many bugs and performance problems this way. It's cheaper, it instils empathy in product decisions, and our customers love the user experience as a result.
Similarly, one of my first big decisions after joining was to wean ourselves from our AWS addiction using Kubernetes. This also allowed us to design a dev env that fits on a modern machine comfortably, but can scale to entire Hospital Trusts in production. Once again: focusing on portability now means we can sell our product on-prem and hybrid, because we designed our developer UX this way.
And given it was data-size dependent, I wouldn't be surprised this was not an issue at the start while someone who's job it was to look for this kind of issue was looking. And the issue appeared after they got retasked to something else.
In fact maybe this is the only kind of issue that you end up with after all is said and done. Just like in WW2 they reinforced the parts of the fuselage on returning fighter craft without bullet holes, because if a bullet hit there, the craft would not return.
I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with the system without making any actual improvements and call it “paying down technical debt”.
Give me a PM (or good engineer) that understands the bigger picture every time.
This is the definition of a flippant comment. Why should society require we become the lord of our own domain or a political chameleon just so that we can advocate for decent standards? Should people who live on flood plains "just move" when the tide comes in? Ridiculous.
Understanding the bigger picture includes understanding the developer's point of view.
> I’ve worked around too many startups ruled by developers. They’re being run into the ground because those developers think technical NFRs as defined by them are the be all and end all. They’re not. Those same developers will happily spend months fiddling with the system without making any actual improvements and call it “paying down technical debt”.
Sounds like those super-clever managers didn't understand what the hell was going on to me. Perhaps they should've held their nose and tried to learn about their product so they can understand and communicate that bigger picture they speak of instead of abdicating their adversarial role and leaving dev teams rudderless.
I was referring to this sentence: you're now telling us that the ideal good engineer understands the developer's point of view but doesn't agree with it. It sounds like you just want to be surrounded by yes men to me. The perfect recipe for a failed startup.
As a senior programmer I respect business priorities and I don't go fixing technical debt for months.
That being said, we the people suck at moderation. See, the problem I faced was exactly the opposite of what you encountered: I've been too accommodating and allowed myself to be micro-managed to the point of a manager telling me how should I do my job; that's when it finally clicked with me on what a toxic workplace have I landed back then.
So neither of both extremes is good. I agree business priorities have to be respected; absolutely. At the same time we shouldn't allow the businessmen to tell us we can't ever fix technical debt.
What makes you think this isn't the case? Business metrics holding an adversarial position over other interests obviously doesn't preclude business metrics defeating other interests.
It's the #1 complaint. The thing that makes this egregious isn't so much that they didn't fix the #1 complain, the thing that makes it egregious is that it's a simple enough flaw that a mediocre developer could have just run WPR/WPA against it and see that 90% of those 5+ minutes was spent in strlen. Maybe it's not their area, maybe they don't know how to fix it, but they will recognize that it's a problem with a likely easy fix.
So even if we completely ignore the fact that it's the #1 complaint, it's still egregious that it's been allowed to go on for this long.
I don't disagree that the "environment" itself could do more to further making improvements outside of the assigned work - initiatives such as 20% time, cafe days, etc. exist in other companies. But I don't put the blame on the curiosity of the people themselves.
If SWEs can only work on features and do nothing else that is still a sign of poor project management. Just accepting that fate is worse for your growth I’d wager.
But idk, I never worked in an environment that encouraged curious people either. I suppose the closest for me was working at Comcast but that was only one manager with a small team of 4 people and no real deadlines.
I feel like two separate thoughts came from replies to my comment. One advocating for engineers to push back and care about their crafts, the other absolving the choices that were clearly made by people as some mechanized process that could never be changed.
The only thing I’m wondering is what the replies would be like 10 years ago on HN.