Users want to load and edit PDFs. Finnish has been rendering right to left for months, but the easy fix will break Hebrew. The engineers say a new rendering engine is critical or these things will just get worse. Sales team says they’re blocked on a significant contract because the version tracking system allows unaudited “clear history” operations. Reddit is going berserk because the icon you used (and paid for!) for the new “illuminated text mode” turns out to be stolen from a Lithuanian sports team.
Knowing that most of your users only start the app when their OS forces a reboot… just how much priority does startup time get?
On my Laptop where I am forced by my company to run windows, I run word 2010 and it runs far better(speed and stability) that the newest word I have to use ob my office pc.
Part of getting this to happen is setting the right culture and incentives. PM is such a nebulous term that I can't say this definitively, but I don't think the responsibility for this lies with them. Some poor performance is simply tech debt and should be tackled in the same way.
$WORD_PROCESSOR employees should be capable of this: we've all seen how they interview.
To be fair, this is because they mostly care about serving ads. Without the ads, the pages are often fine.
People argue "sure, it's not optimal, but it's good enough". But that compounds. A little slower each time. A little slower each application. You test on your VM only running your program.
But all of this forgets what makes software so powerful AND profitable: scale. Since we always need to talk monetary value, let's do that. Shaving off a second isn't much if it's one person or one time but even with a thousand users that's over 15 minutes, per usage. I mean we're talking about a world where American Airlines talks about saving $40k/yr by removing an olive and we don't want to provide that same, or more(!), value to our customers? Let's say your employee costs $100k/yr and they use that program once a day. That's 260 seconds or just under 5 minutes. Nothing, right? A measly $4. But say you have a million users. Now that's $4 million!
Now, play a fun game with me. Just go about your day as normal but pay attention to all those little speedbumps. Count them as $1m/s and let me know what you got. We're being pretty conservative here as your employee costs a lot more than their salary (2-3x) and we're ignoring slowdown being disruptive and breaking flow. But I'm willing to bet in a typical day you'll get on the order of hundreds of millions ($100m is <2 minutes).
We solve big problems by breaking them into a bunch of smaller problems, so don't forget that those small problems add up. It's true even if you don't know what big problem you're solving.
Fuck this "we don't need to optimize" bullshit. Fuck this "minimum viable product" bullshit. It's just a race to the bottom. No one paper cut is the cause of death, but all of them are when you have a thousand.
> No one paper cut is the cause of death, but all of them are when you have a thousand.
ironically, sometimes its the reactions to big issues that cause paper-cuts to flourish (aka red-tape, incident mitigation, rushing to deadlines, "temporary" bug fixes piling up etc etc)
Then you agree with the poster. Performance critical software should focus on performance.