> Does your game take forever to start? Your lazy devs say there's nothing to be done about it? Just give us a call! As seen on hackernews.
Or more likely, no one had time to look. I keep see people acting like not fixing something is because the devs don't care. More often than not it's because we're being told to do something else instead.
"I don't have time to do it myself" is probably a very common reason why consultants are hired.
Or maybe this was a case of a rare low-hanging fruit lying around for someone to find. Maybe the entire software industry is not one giant low hanging fruit waiting for the right genius to emerge and pick.
And yes, there are many code bases where performance isn't prioritized in all areas, and one totally can expect a skilled engineer coming in to look at performance to find nice speed increases here and there. Not because they are magically better than everyone else, but because a) they are given the freedom to spend time on it where nobody else has been and b) because they are possibly more familiar with approaches and tooling than a dev that hasn't had the opportunity to prioritize performance. All your examples likely do have such people available, and thus bringing someone in is less likely to find something really juicy, unless they have some blindspot. Large game projects for sure have performance experts, but maybe they primarily spend their time on in-game performance and initial resource loading was a blind spot. Maybe that's a common blind spot. And outside games that's commonly waaay worse - performance isn't prioritized, and to be fair the fact that slower-than-necessary software usually sells just as well makes that understandable economically for a long time. But also makes it difficult if it gets to the point where it should/must matter.
In my experience, YES! It is often the new set of eyes (especially if they are on a a smart head with lots of time, energy and will available) that finds new solutions, optimizations and bugs we never thought about. And the people I work with are the smartest people I have ever met and that still is nowhere near enough to ensure that the large scale software projects we work on have had all the possible large optimizations done already.
His tweet:
Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
Are there other notable cases of people who got turned down in spite of - or because of - their extensive knowledge in a case like this?
[0] https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/
The other person was much better match for a small company / startup.
edit: actually, nevermind. I realize you're probably referring to the hashmap lookup part, rather than the strlen() part?
GTA V came out 8 years ago, it had to run on the base PS4/Xbox One not to mention the PS3 and 360 these were the systems it was first validated on.
It also had much much less content at the time.
As the game released on PC and the amount of content grew the loading times didn’t regress but they also didn’t improve.
So when your benchmark is a console that loads a game in 5-10 minutes no one probably spent any time investigating what the bounds on a modern PC with PCIe storage should be.
I haven't been at any that have cared (none of my past jobs' have been FAANG, but several have been in the over 10k employees size.)
*SOME* potential colleagues care, and a VERY FEW managers care that you know that, but I have found that to be the exception.
My tech lead actually helped me by saying that the trick is that instead of trying to speed up my own code base (which was really hard), it's easier to find something to improve outside my change to balance for the 0.1ms impact inside the same experiment.
Opening closed doors is frequently THE thing that changes a persons circumstances. Anyone who's been ghosted by an application process can attest to that. You can (interview) prepare all you want, but if you can't get in front of someone it won't matter.
I think people over estimate how valuable reputation is. It can open doors but that is all. Being the guy who reduced loading times in GTA may get some VC interest but that doesn't automatically equate to making any money. It may get you a job and get you paid a few thousand more than usual. But honestly, I've never seen one of these famous devs make lots of money. They'll get offered CTO roles but that's been the max.