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Comment by brhsagain | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this argument is that software is not just a little bit slow, it is insanely slow. Like if you break down what Teams actually does, and count how many CPU cycles that should take with some quick napkin math, Teams is slower than that by at least a thousand times. Obviously this kind of first-principles thinking is idealistic, but the result should not be underperforming that by several orders of magnitude.

The real problem is just the general practice of how software is developed now. If we lived in a world where software development was sane, it would be possible to prioritize speed of development and cut some corners to ship faster, and get a result that is somewhat slower but not ten whole seconds to start up slow.

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My girlfriend works for a large consulting firm. Her mid-to-high-end work laptop runs the standard smattering of PM applications you’d expect (e.g. Teams).

I watch her screen sometimes to see the differences in our workflows. It is incredible the high latencies and low speeds she has come to view as acceptable in application performance. 2-3 seconds to toggle a menu that’s toggled 30 times in a day; 4 seconds for a small file list update that is performed regularly; tabs in Edge frequently hanging; on and on this goes.

Just sad, really, especially when we have a half gig connection going both ways. The work being performed (and the features designed to do it) should not be seen as resource heavy… because it isn’t. It’s the same exact bs that was done on computers in corporate settings 20 years ago. We’ve added collaborative editing and auto save as defaults - that’s the extent of the difference.

How did we get here?

I wonder if this has to do with the Steve Jobs/Apple-ification of software, followed by a bastardization of those principles. It feels like during the "computers as the intersection of art and technology" era, it was understood that while the goal was to create something beautifully designed, the way to get there was through feats of technical ingenuity, and that design included a large functionality component. Then computers got super duper fast, and it became possible for web software to keep the "art" part (being visually gorgeous) but not the "technology" part (being slow as shit).

That seems harsh. Apple famously hardly uses the web stack and prefers their own platform. Their software is also pretty high performance in general and starts quickly, partly as a consequence. Software would have focused on branding no matter what, that was already a trend in the 1990s with WinAmp, every Office version having a unique look etc.

Just wait until you try Ventura. Every submenu in the systems settings menu has gone from being perfectly fast, to taking around two seconds to load (at least on my 2019 MBP)..

I know :( People remark on it though exactly because it seems like a sudden and recent decline in standards.

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