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Comment by paul_grisham | Hacker News Reader

> But even if that turns out to be true, it still means programmers have to care about performance!

Who is he even talking to at this point? He's arguing that performance has more than 0% relevance to software, which no-one on disagrees with.

>claims there is no argument to be had, and that performance somehow won’t matter anywhere in a product lifecycle

No-one says performance never matters. People disagree on what performance merits optimization. A 5s to 1s page load improvement is massive, a .5s to .1s improvement starts hitting diminishing returns in user experience.

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Yes, there are definitely people who argue that performance never matters.

And the research Facebook (and others) have done clearly shows that a half–second loading time on a webpage loses them a lot of money. So much money that they were willing to have dozens to hundreds of engineers work for years to fix it across all of their apps and their web servers and apis. Presumably it costs a small–time business a similar percentage, but if that’s not enough money to justify paying a developer to fix the problem then by all means spend the money elsewhere.

>Yes, there are definitely people who argue that performance never matters.

Never seen one, post an example.

>half–second loading time on a webpage loses them a lot of money.

I didn't say milliseconds don't matter, I said it was diminishing returns. The size of those returns depend on the business. For Facebook it matters because users have other options to use their attention on such as Youtube and other social media. A B2B SaaS such as some CI/CD tool can care less about it because their users have lock in, they can't just switch tab to a different CI/CD tool and start using it immediately. So the threshold of acceptable performance depends entirely on the use case, which the author keeps ignoring to fight strawman absolutist arguments instead.

He's bringing out the men made of straw because there's a culture in many places, including my work, of YAGNI.

We did not properly federate many of our services and aystems, it is costing us tons of person hours to work around or deal with as our org chart grows. However, it's exactly the kind of thing that unlike Facebook - it is difficult to get metrics on how many dollars it will save or create, so it doesn't get fixed and people still wonder why anyone would care enough to fix it.

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