But why would we waste thousands of hours of programmers time to optimize stuff, if we can instead waste millions if not billions of hours of users' time?
/s
/s
Yet on hacker news, the exact opposite sentiment is true.
Employee hours are expensive, so optimise as much as you possibly can and push as much time onto the user as they will tolerate. Focus primarily on readability to the detriment of all other factors. Heck, even don’t bother compiling your program. Use an interpreter on the server.
Keep your local cost down, your remote cost up… after all remote cost are not your cost, especially if every company is doing the same thing.
It’s ironic that I could read a book and it be so wrong, yet that book is the foundation Bible for many people’s programming journey.
It's incorrect to make a bookshelf that can't hold the weight of books, but IKEA isn't incorrect to make a crappy-but-adequate bookshelf that will get given away when you move, and a master carpenter isn't incorrect to make an expensive-but-beautiful bookshelf that will be used for many decades.
A seed-stage startup trying to see if anyone cares about their product at all should probably accept it being 100x slower than it theoretically could be. And the Linux maintainers should be working hard to shave milliseconds.
If you are a startup (many HN readers are), employee hours are relatively expensive. The goal is to get a product out as fast as possible, and most of the time you fail at making a working product anyways. Meanwhile, you only have to spend money on servers once you have a successful product. Deferring the problem makes sense here.
On the other hand, I personally write code that'll be near guaranteed to run millions of times in some factory somewhere, and there's little benefit if I ship my code before the factory starts making stuff. I'll take the time to write high-performance and high-quality software because there's now a financial benefit to doing so.
But ultimately, it's my boss who gives me insight into what I should be doing. Not a book, because the book doesn't have context that [company] will lose tens of thousands of dollars every day that I don't fix [issue].
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?”
That's not even counting loss of quality-adjusted life years from time spent staring at a screen waiting, like being stuck in traffic.