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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

> While reviews note that you can run PUBG and other 3D games with decent performance on a Tecno Spark 8C, this doesn't mean that the device is fast enough to read posts on modern text-centric social media platforms or modern text-centric web forums. While 40fps is achievable in PUBG, we can easily see less than 0.4fps when scrolling on these sites.

Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that users won't even be able to tell the difference.

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The sad part being that traditional marketing cares very little about these users outside of the aggregation parts.

When the goal is to make people pay, a base strategy is to target user who are already spending money. So "fast enough on a current [device sales team is using]" becomes the baseline, and optimizing for older/weaker/cheaper environments isn't an proposition that will convince.

Except when you're ad supported. Then the balance will be a bit more in the middle.

I imagine it has more to do with the monstrous website design than the tracking scripts. New reddit vs old reddit or desktop reddit vs mobile Reddit shouldn't be that different in terms of tracking. But the newer ones run like ass.

Reddit doesn't even run satisfactorily in my gaming laptop. I can run AAA games but a website is noticeably slow.

Just curious, are you using old.reddit.com?

One time long ago, e-commerce company i worked for decided to add tiktok analytics to the front-end. The dev team added the changes but were worried it might impact performance and UX. As a solution we were told to run the performance tests to check it.

The performance tests were created to mimic user behaviour but only involved company APIs. Not third party requests. No one in the top level, cared about this bit of information. We ran this performance test and saw the the response times are almost the same so it's time to pat ourselves on the back and move on ...

Did no one call bullshit on the test before running it? Personally I'd just flat out refuse to run the test, likely designing the proper test comparing while third party scripts where enabled.

Management and product owners should understand how these things work, and shouldn't ask for bogus data when they do. But teams implementing the changes should just flat out refuse when they know the request isn't reasonable.

Sir, in most companies if you suggest something technical without having equivalent political power, at best, no one will listen to you. At worst you will create political enemies.

Probably there was an SDE-2 or SDE-3 who called bullshit on it and got ignored.

You call bullshit on it by either refusing to run the test, or better and more helpfully by running a test that answers the performance question.

I've seen these kinds of requests plenty of ways. Sometimes those asking include a design or specs because they honestly thought that was the right way to do it, other times they are knowingly asking for (in this case) a useless test to check a box. In either case, IMO the right response is to ask questions to clarify the goals and build to that, changing the provided design or specs if necessary.

I've had to play this out dozens of times over the years and never earned enemies from if, at one point I won over the PM leader that everyone on the dev team warned me about. Its all about tact and approach, assume everyone is on the up and up and just ask good questions to clarify the goals. Its hard to get mad at that unless its done in a condescending or argumentative way.

To be fair, it is usually difficult to tell the difference between 243 tracking scripts and 244.

Modern webdev is fugged

(But don't under any circumstances break the four other trackers already running on the site.)

You mean the four new ones they added last week alone, right?

Newpaper sites are notorious for this.

These days they coerce the dev team into implementing a tag manager so they can add their filthy trackers without asking the dev team.

The "they" here can't really coerce the dev team unless the dev team is willing to comply. Refusing to implement an unethical feature is always an option, and given that we're often considered engineers it is well within our right to deem something unsafe or against best practices.

I hate all that tracking and marketing bs as much as the next guy but if the marketing team is the main stakeholder and is responsible for the budget that won't work. I also might be a bit biased as a freelancer but every team I worked in so far had other freelancers on it and if we strongly recommend aginst a practice but the client insisted then we basically had the choice to either abandon the project (and therefore our current source of income) or simply do what they say. I would love to be on a position where refusing is an option that would not cost me my gig.

This thread really has no purpose if we don't see it as enough of a problem to stand against. I really don't mean that to sound like I'm on a high horse (I'm sure it still sounds that way). There's nothing wrong with being okay with the trade offs, but we don't get to implement these features and complain about how bad they are.

> Remember this the next time marketing asks the frontend team to implement that new tracking script and everyone assumes that users won't even be able to tell the difference.

I mean, maybe they can but the business doesn't care. If you polled "users" of cable television I doubt anyone would say they prefer the experience of commercials.

PUBG is now a very special beast: It's CPU bound = we are unlikely to ever see a "AAA" game with anything beyond it's complexity for eternity. You can run it on a 1030 GPU at 60 FPS.

It's not like websites are GPU bound

No but most games are. Thus PUBG is an outlier.

Somebody has to be working on a Simcity or Civilization MMO.

I wish! The truth is server and client programmers rarely get along so persistent MMOs with alot of moving parts are only going to happen once one developer is schizo enough to do both well. AAA will never be able to do it.

Just throw a ticket in jira for these stupid devs to "make it faster".

To make Jira faster ?

Firing up my neoliberal brain.

We should just tax ad and spying on users bandwidth and front/backend end resource use.

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