So I highly doubt the people driving this initiative are just "unfamiliar with how to improve their software's performance". Something else is going on here: maybe they were saddled with something so bad it could only be fixed so much, maybe there's some technical hurdle we're just not appreciating, maybe it's an organizational problem (this is my guess). But Slack has a similar problem, so I doubt it's the first possibility (the 1.0 of the app just happened to be botched). There's something going on here
Here's my wild uninformed guess: Teams has lots of features/integrations, and they're constantly expanding because it's in the limelight right now, so they've got too many engineers on it working on different features at the same time and not talking to each other enough. The system is now too sprawling to be considered (or optimized) as a whole, which means there's tons of redundancy and toes-stepping going on. Shipping the org chart, etc.
(Ask me where this vivid picture came from)
They started with Electron, and are now moving to WebView2. When the project started Edge was still not Chromium based (it was the IE fork) so they couldn't even use that.
"We always run at 60 fps, because if we finish the game, then try to optimize our way to 60, we'll never hit it."
>> This suggests that there is probably a handful of things they are doing that are low-hanging fruit ...
The Quake annecdote suggests the opposite. If I had to guess (from personal experience with web development), it's probably a million-billion little things that, when added up, make your whole project a slow, gelatinous pile.
That's not to say there's not also low-hanging fruit that might make switching between conversations take less than a second, but .. it should take .. like .. a short amount of time, like 16.6ms, including the network trip.
(note that a game running at 60 FPS does not mean that you get 16.6ms mouse-to-screen latency at all)
In 16.6ms a modern processor will execute about 128 million instructions. We need to locate about a screenful of text and/or cat pictures. We need to perform layout and then render it. The amount of work being done is not very much, or very difficult. The resources available are luxurious.
What part of the problem is it that makes it an unrealistic target?
Sure, so there will be latency, maybe 4-5 frames with input lag. But this is normally bearable in a game so I'm guessing that it would work fine for an office app. It would be difficult to remove, but 80ms response time from an application that can always hit its 16.6ms deadline should be workable.
Hard disagree. Sorry, but rant inc ...
If we can't hit 60fps with a chat app, one of the simplest applications imaginable by man, what the hell can we hit 60 with? It's drawing a couple thousand triangles (maybe) with a couple hundred textures (I guess). Game engines fart a couple thousand triangles when they're done drawing 50x+ that. Oh, and they do about a gazillion other operations .. at 60fps+
The slow part of switching between conversations is fetching the data which, on a fiber connection in a city, is < 5ms round trip. Hell, I live in the boonies in Canada and my round trip to Seattle is only like 20ms. You could also cache the first 20 messages to every conversation (disk space is cheap) to avoid the network.
As for the notion that "you need to care about such low-level things ...", yes, you do. To write fast software you just deal with it and move on.
Seems like you're simply not aware of complexities of the display path. Please make a simple windowed OpenGL application displaying a single triangle in thousands FPS that changes color when you press a key and measure its latency, you may be surprised ;)
If we're splitting hairs about how we define how long an application takes to update, we've already won.
In reality, we're talking about an app that should take ~0.01s to perform an operation (update a rectangular region with text), that's taking 1.0s instead. And that's THE OPTIMIZED VERSION. In the real world, we've already lost, which is what Casey was pointing out in his tweet.
And yes, of course, something is seriously wrong with a lot of applications these days, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.
"It's a bit of understatement to say @WebKit project cares about performance or efficiency of the software. We're quite obsessed with it, and we throw a lot of engineering resources at it, not to regress, and to improve upon."
Then they aren't "engineers" yet. Engineers can figure out how to use a profiler and how to improve performance of their software. Calling themselves "engineers" while being unable to do so should be a signal to everyone in their circle that they're incompetent hacks. They should at least be honest and give themselves an appropriate title, like "apprentice" or "intern" or "novice" or "student".
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
I think all software engineers should be taught to be able to handle a profiler, poke around in a debugger, write a short correctness proof, and consider how an attacker might abuse the APIs they expose. I know a lot of people who are working to make this dream a reality right now. Until this happens, though, gatekeeping the definition of an engineer is inappropriate and does nothing to help improve the situation, because people are generally resistant to learning these things if you call them "incompetent hacks".
Profilers are simple tools that every software engineer should be familiar with. They are literally just a way to measure performance of a software system. The basic ones do this by tracking time, or counting the number of times a block of code are entered. People have recreated them a million times (probably more) because they're so damned easy to create.
I'll take my hit for this one: If someone were to come up to me and say, "I'm an engineer, but I don't know how to measure the software I make." I'd think they were a hack, yes. If they instead were honest and said, "I'm a student studying to become an engineer ..." or "I'm a novice trying to become better..." then at least they're honest individuals and not liars or hacks. If that's gatekeeping, then so be it. They are not engineers yet if they can't use the software equivalent of a ruler.
It's not gatekeeping.
Traditional engineering fields have somewhat standardized expectations around what a new grad should know. Same as law or Medicine/Nursing. When someone calls himself a Software Engineer, I too have an expectation of what they should know.
It's part of what made the scene where Katherine Johnson explains Euler's method as a little known math trick to a group of bewildered NASA engineers so funny. Everyone in that room would have been familiar with that concept as it's the first numerical method encountered in a differential equation class [0].
I would love some sort of standardized curriculum for Software Engineering. No exam, just a list of pre-requisite and concepts.
[0] The real work she did would have probably required a separate two hour documentary so I understand the filmmaker's decision here.
>> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” - Karl Marx
Therefore we should hide the truth?
Sorry, it doesn't matter what field you are in, if you can only build stuff but you lack at least a solid familiarity with the tools and techniques of your trade that enable you to improve the performance of your product/service, you are simply not yet fully competent.
Period. Full stop.
If you can write code that compiles and runs, and even do it at large scale, that's nice. But have some humility and recognize that while this is definitely far better than nothing, it is NOT the end, it is merely the beginning, and you are not yet anything special.
Same applies for any field. It is really great go from nothing to being able to build functioning stuff, but it is only the beginning.
Sadly, many people get one year of experience 20 times over, and then get all full of themselves thinking this is the same as 20 years of of digging deep into the technology. Saving them the hard assessment does no one any good.
It's fair to expect a professional cook to be able to cook well. Guarding their feelings for their incompetent cooking serves no purpose, since they become useless to their firm, and customers will want to avoid what they cook.
The same expectation should hold for professional engineers. If they are incompetent hacks, tell them they are. Guarding their feelings above describing reality to them only lets their illusion of competence to continue, and is what causes poor software, more incompetent incompetent engineers, and troubled users.
It is the incompetent hacks who have failed themselves, by not being aware, and by not adapting and improving accordingly. The 'system' did not fail them.
The real world is not a college or school or university, where things are fed to you on your time. Employees must learn on their own time and other people's time. If they cannot keep up, then let's be real: they are incompetent.
By blaming the system, you take away the accountability and responsibility of incompetent people. If many better programmers were able to catch up, why can't they? We can't make excuses for incompetence.
What are they doing?
> Until this happens, though, gatekeeping the definition of an engineer is inappropriate and does nothing to help improve the situation, because people are generally resistant to learning these things if you call them "incompetent hacks".
So they should instead be coddled?
How does it not help to simply say: Here's something everyone from a decent engineering program should know on graduation?
> How does it not help to simply say: Here's something everyone from a decent engineering program should know on graduation?
This does.
> So they should instead be coddled?
This doesn't. I'll let you figure out what the difference is between these two.
For example, speaking completely independently from the problem here but putting on my performance hat, I would expect that if we take all things as a given (“no major architectural changes allowed”) Teams should not take 10 seconds to start up to show UI. We know that the tech stack they’re using isn’t fundamentally that bad. This suggests that there is probably a handful of things they are doing that are low-hanging fruit but haven’t been identified yet. Once they find those and bring down the time to something more reasonable like a second things will get much harder for them to fix.