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Comment by Manfrednotfunny | Hacker News Reader

C* can mean anything.

The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second.

I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month.

I fixed the SQL query, the problem was gone forever.

The same CTO got lulled into some weird talks with some AWS Account Manager for no reason. He told me what we should do and i explained to him how all of this (nicely of course) doesn't correlate to what we have, do and need.

I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.

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> I'm often enough surprised that our society runs.

It runs because there are just enough people who know what they are doing and quietly do it often against headwinds in just about all the places they need to be.

Which works until it doesn't, We've gradually been removing those people in the name of "efficiency" with somewhat predictable systemic results across the board.

Sounds like the CTO is right though? Why prioritize this? Surely there are way more important things to do. You are judging him for not thinking it’s important because you said so, that’s not strong argument.

That's how you chase efficiency/quality which is one of the CTOs responsibility. Small effort for huge gains are the most optimal changes.

Huge gains? What was the impact of this change, considering the only context that we have is that it was not important to the customer? Answer should be expressed in terms of cost, revenue, profit.

I don’t doubt the CTO was exercising poor judgement, but I do doubt that op was communicating his concerns in a way that was tailored to the audience

If the CTO was right about the premise it'd be fine, but much more likely he pulled the "everyone is happy with 1s" out of his arse and then used his position/authority to bully the team.

No he was not.

The fix was a few hours, the customer called him regularly. The CTO had no understanding that a basic SQL Insert shouldn't take a second.

This fix smoothed all response times on all queries and that customer never called aabout this issue again.

there was an engineering director at my previous company (and who was former Amazon) who wrote his first PR with Claude

it had 30k lines of diff and was a complete refactor of how one of our core features worked

the staff eng he tagged to code review it politely declined to do so and given that this director was let go fairly recently, I'd like to imagine that the PR will exist as a fun surprise for any future maintainer running cleanup

Most things get done in spite of management, not because of it.

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