Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtowey | Hacker News Reader

> If its not done its because there is no money in it. In fact the opposite

This bears repeating. It's the disease that has consumed software and is making all modern software the worst possible version of itself.

I think it's the VC funding model which has driven the industry this way. Startups get millions in funding, then it's a race to make enough money to pay back those investors which leads to this. The companies have to squeeze dollars from their app as fast as possible which means anything that doesn't have a ROI metric attached to it will not get a second of anyone's attention.

View on HN

Honestly, there are many reasons for our current situation. One is that companies aren't (usually) run by engineers; they're run by product or business people. Those types don't care about performance, website footprints, smooth scrolling, etc. They care about adding new features, getting users, and doing so as fast as possible. Another reason is that many web developers were taught that software engineering is mashing together a mixture of Node, Ionic, Bootstrap, Vue.js, Angular, jQuery, etc. to quickly make a website. No one was taught how to do things on their own so they just bundle framework after framework into their projects just to do simple things. Finally, it's not like people built highly performant software in the 90s because they genuinely embodied this article's spirit; they did so out of necessity. As soon as computers got fast enough, we stopped having to focus on micro-optimizations just to get our products to run.

> Those types don't care about performance, website footprints, smooth scrolling, etc

they don't care because their _users_ don't care.

I find these discussions are always led by engineers, shaking their fists at clouds. nobody cares! it doesn't make any money so you're just whining into the void.

That's like saying only engineers care about appliances that work long past the warranty expiration; users don't so business people value engineer it and everyone except the engineers are happy.

Except that's not true. Users do care they just don't have a choice in the matter. I have listened to many, many laypeople who have expressed frustration with software. They may not be able to articulate it to the extent that the quote does, but when they're stuck on 3G and they need to load a webpage that keeps timing out they get frustrated even if they don't know its because of the footprint, it's a poorly made SPA, or whatever.

I think often users do care but they have no meaningful way to tell anyone this or otherwise cause change. I hate the banking web app (from a major US bank) that I have to use. It is incredibly slow, buggy, poorly laid out, and occasionally just decides to put up a spinner forever. Who do I complain to about this. If you call and tell a customer service rep they'll just tell you to refresh and try again, often sympathetically. They know its terrible and hear many complaints themselves, but also have no power to do anything about it.

> they don't care because their _users_ don't care.

I respectfully disagree. I think the users care, but they don't make their own choices - their choices are made for them by people who don't care!

Was MS Teams chosen by their end-users? Nope.

Come to think of it - was Slack chosen by their end-users? No, again.

End-user's aren't given an option, usually:

1. For B2B the choice rests with one (or a few) people.

2. For B2C the choice is made purely because some product got some traction for reasons unrelated to its quality, and that was enough to force the rest of the users to follow or be left out of the network (Slack, Facebook, major shopping sites, etc).

The majority of end-users did not exercise any choice.

Pretty sure we had people spin up a Slack instance at our company while we were still on Hipchat officially. Slack was a big improvement over what we had before that IMO.

This gives engineers a bit too much credit. We have a tendency to heavily over index on last year's problems. That or exploring edge cases that also make no bloody sense.

Indeed, the very existence of so many frameworks is also very easy to blame on errant engineering.

> This gives engineers a bit too much credit. We have a tendency to heavily over index on last year's problems. That or exploring edge cases that also make no bloody sense.

When I was in university (a long time ago, shortly after the big bang :-)) the informal motto of the computer science faculty and students was Computer Science: Solving Yesterdays Problems, Tomorrow!

Now that I think about it, I don't find it that funny anymore.

>> It's the disease that has consumed software

This is another example of Scott Alexander's Moloch: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

"companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing- for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com