The problem with slow tools (2021)

One of the worst unspoken bits is the cognitive load associated with such long running things, e.g compile or CI, which ideally are successful but that's not always the case, so you're doing something else while - consciously or not - anxiously waiting for the other thing to complete.

And when - when! - that job fails, you can be pretty sure it racks up some cortisol as one has to interrupt† your second task, pop back to the original context, curse at oneself for forgetting that comma or whatever simple thing, rerun, rinse, and repeat.

† The alternative is to finish (or reach a checkpoint) your other task, but that has cumulative latency effects on the duration of that other task that is supposed to be your main one.

If everyone on the team is easily distracted then why would you focus on speeding up slow tooling instead of focusing on making your team resilient to distractions?

That's why I hibernate my computers.

Problem is that Microsoft is trying to kill hibernation (so far they did the first step to hide it, then second step to hide it even better).

Why do the companies not realize that employees coming to office, waiting for computer to start, then opening their programs - is an incredible waste of time and productivity? Why companies dont push microsoft to make hibernation the default? (plus some smart feature for updates)

1000 times this.

Also, the time of focus loss grows highly super-linearly with the distracting delay time. One second could be imperceptible, once you get used to it, 15 seconds is enough to get distracted by looking at something else, like checking IM / email and spending 2-3 minutes on returning to the full focus, and 2 minutes is enough to go for a coffee / reddit / YouTube, and a potential loss of an hour of focus time.

> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces

I get so angry at this sort of thing. The M1 chips are so fast! When they came out they could open basically any program instantly. But now that they’ve been out for awhile, developers everywhere are (of course) just assuming everyone has an M1 or faster and doing even less optimization on their code. So the net effect is that software doesn’t get any faster. We just collectively spent billions of dollars on new hardware with almost no tangible benefit. (The exceptions being high performance computing - like AI or AAA video games where optimizations still matter).

Computers are fast. Slow software comes from lazy developers who steal your cpu cycles instead of doing their jobs properly.

It’s inexcusable.

My 2011 thinkpad is easily many times slower than the m1/m2, yet, when running i3 on my thinkpad, the feel of responsiveness is a lot more snappy as in instance. So in reality, I have a lot less of what you mention on my ancient thinkpad than the m1 for most of what I do daily.

> my macbook now seems to often stutter for 2-3 seconds switching spaces

Wow, mine (M1 MBA) is less than one second. I either use command+tab or the trackpad. I’d be crossed too if it took that long for me.

All true statements. However, it's conceptually easier to grasp the impact of 3% of my time when I think about what I can or cannot accomplish in a 1.5 week period, rather than a 15 minute period. Some 15 minutes are jam-packed with productivity, while others are a coffee break, so I don't really understand what 15 minutes of my time is worth. Whereas, each work week is nearer to my average productivity, and I have a much clearer idea of what that's worth in terms of work output.

If a person reads this "if you do the math" reasoning and has a different reaction to the same cost depending on how it's presented, then, wasn't it a good thing that the reader was given a variety of ways to think about the cost? (Since, necessarily, the reader's reaction to at least one of the presentations was incorrect.)

How large is your morgage rate? Imagine that you could shave 3% off its rate, say, turn 7% into 4%. Would it make a difference for you?

Same applies to most companies. Unless they are in an explosive growth phase, or in a catastrophic collapse phase, 3% change in expense / efficiency of the engineering organization is pretty noticeable.

Actually you are ignoring the main argument here that people aren't perfect and that the risk of losing more time due to people getting distracted, reading slack, going on long coffee breaks, etc. is substantial and very real. You lose all that time; not just the build time. And having to wait is frustrating and demotivating. And let's face it, a 1 minute build is actually pretty sweet. I've been on teams where it is closer to 20. And worse. That really sucks the life out of you if you have to sit and wait for that to happen fifteen times in a day. People wasting hours per day waiting for builds, CI, etc. to happen is not cheap.

How can you walk uphill BOTH ways?

... and mind you, there were no fast food restaurants either. So it took a really long time.

Left out the mandatory https://xkcd.com/303/

Now it's "CI tests!"

I worked in a company where the codebase of a team took hours to compile so it was compiled every nights.

Interestingly, it may have been beneficial to focus because you had to work the entire day without compiling the code. I suppose that in this situation, fast tests is what you need.

This is what corporate diapers are for.

He's doing that in the context of advocating for better tools.

If you could install an update that made you need to pee 10x less often, wouldn't you jump on that opportunity?

Especially if the urge keeps interrupting you when you're right in the middle of solving something?