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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

> So it’s our mission as engineers to show the world what’s possible with today’s computers in terms of performance, reliability, quality, usability. If we care, people will learn. And there’s nobody but us to show them that it’s very much possible. If only we care.

Software engineers by and large care and yet we can't even get the businesses we work for to care, the stakeholders that performance would matter to arguably the most. I think the average person is even more apathetic about a topic like optimizing app performance.

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I have made very different experiences. The programmers don't care either. They just want to pump out features, no maintenance, no documentation, no long-term improvements.

That's not what the programmers want. It's how they're incentivized. If you have to meet your "they're not deadlines but, really, they are" sprint targets, then what can you do but minimally complete the tickets assigned to you and hope not to step on anyone's toes?

It doesn't help that good programmers get flushed out of the industry due to conscience and age, only to be replaced with cheap, shitty ones.

No, in my case that's really what they want. I think our project management would totally give us the time to improve something, if we can argue that it's needed. It's really one or two developers who block everything that isn't the absolute minimum possible amount of work or their own pet idea.

> I think our project management would totally give us the time to improve something, if we can argue that it's needed.

You shouldn't have to argue for it. It's something "project management" should care about as a top-level concern, scheduling time for it. Stability, documentation, tests, performance, security - these are all "features" just as much as "make a button dump a CSV for a user".

I mean, they do to the extent that they can. We have a story template that specifically mentions performance, monitoring, security and documentation requirements. We also have weekly meetings to discuss technical issues and a dedicated backlog where devs are supposed to put purely technical stories, but it is usually empty. When the prevaling philosophy of the dev team (or its most vocal members) is "'good enough' is good enough", then there's not much the project management can do short of forcing a minimum amount of maintenance tasks. Of course, project management is also happy if they have more capacity for feature stories, so the impulse has to come from the dev team.

Often (good) PMs assume that those tasked with making technical decisions implicitly understand all the listed concerns are, in fact, requirements. They are then surprised when the engineers explain they didn’t prioritize those things when doing the work.

I also share your experience. Never saw management or PO complaining about developers taking time to optimise. I actually never even saw an experienced developer taking an inordinate time to optimise something. It's always refactoring and rewriting that takes too much time (and often causes performance regressions).

Developers however are quick to point that optimisation is "not in the interest of the business", as can be seen in this very topic, or that something is "good enough" since a lot of people are using.

"The programmers don't care either. They just want to pump out features, no maintenance, no documentation, no long-term improvements."

That's how people are taught. In most companies nobody cares about quality. getting stuff out quickly is where the money is. Slow, deliberate work doesn't pay.

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