Hacker News Reader

Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

This is HackerNews so brace for criticism!

Why would a team of talented engineers focus on solving ESLint performance issue? Where is the value in this? If your project is small, ESLint is fast enough. If it's super large like ours (3 millions LOC) then you spend a little time making local and CI linters smarter to run only on changed files. Rewriting in Rust seems cool and novel but now you lost the entire wealth of ESLint plugin ecosystem, you have to keep up with maintaining this new linter which has to be updated very frequently for at least new syntaxes and so on...

We could put this effort into looking into why ESLint is not fast enough and fix the bottlenecks IF we had extra time in our hand...

If it was my team, I would not let them spend time on this. I don't see the value to be honest.

View on HN

They developed a new tool that reduces their CI from 75 minutes to 10 seconds and are offering it for free and open source and you really don’t see the value? I know you warned this is HN but I find this posture ridiculous. If you don’t find value for yourself, that’s one thing but I honestly don’t get this place sometimes.

I'm not complaining about free software offered to world for free. I'm curious how a leader would justify an investment like this? I have engineers reaching to me and asking me to all sort of things. My job is to justify it for the business. Making this costs more than a million dollar if their engineers are paid like ours. Then how you do this? How do you get budget for this?

75 minutes to 10 seconds is no joke in terms of speedups. Imagine that this time is saved for a small team of 4? 10? people who can then inspect/qa/iterate on the build in a PR-preview staging environment. Imagine this kind of time saving across many teams at Shopify’s scale.

Imagine that your pushes to production can happen an hour faster. At Shopify’s scale.

Do you see the pure economic value?

That's not the point. It has value, but it's in comparison to rewriting the actual codebase in an actually appropriate language rather than fixing tooling for a language that was a mistake to use in the first place

I'm not a fan of trying to put hard numbers on unknowns like this because it biases against uncertainty, but if they shaved ~74 minutes off their CI time and assuming it runs multiple times a day that very quick equates to a small teams cost savings over a year.

However, I think trying to find the actual numbers is dumb because there's also the intangibles such as marketing and brand recognition bump by doing this both for the company and individuals involved.

That's not to say all greenfield endeavors should be actioned, but ones with substantial gains like this seem fine given the company is big enough to absorb the initial up front cost of development.

How big is your business? Facebook has poured immense resources into speeding up PHP. It makes sense for them. It doesn't even remotely make sense for me.

However, people tend to underestimate this sort of thing in general. Even since before programming... we have adages about the importance of sharpening the axe precisely because people have been hacking away with metaphorical and literal dull axes hoping to avoid needing to sharpen them for a long time. Sometimes you just won't be able to convince a business person of the importance of stopping work for a moment to sharpen the axe, because all they see is the work stopping. I don't have a solution to that level of lack of wisdom in a leader. These are the people who save $200 per programmer on computer hardware at the cost of 5 hours of productivity lost... per week. Some battles just come pre-lost.

It’s because everyone time someone says “performance”, something clicks in most developers brains, forcing them to respond with weird things like “being 50x slower is actually fast enough”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com