Have testers not suffered enough?!

It's the devs that need the slow machines -- they're in the tightest feedback loop, and directly empowered to optimize performance.

Yes, the slowness of my IDE will surely empower me to optimize... performance of rando enterprise internal website #25628 that I'm currently working on.

Optimizing performance is very nontrivial and often means writing custom stuff, which will deeply affect TCO. It’s fine for devs to sympathize with users, but in the most ultimate perspective the users are actual or potential customers of the business and not your clients.

In other words, the business should have ultimate authority and responsibility to structure incentives and pursue priorities. Up until the engineer crosses over a boundary and becomes part of leadership.

Nobody is saying hand-write it in assembly like RollerCoaster Tycoon so you can get decent performance on a 90MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM.

Tons of software would run faster if it DIDN'T use custom stuff. Don't load a JavaScript framework for form validation if using `required` and `pattern` are enough. Don't write your own sorting algorithm unless it's faster than qsort(). Don't write your own data storage engine if SQLite covers your use case.

Story time: I once wrote a memset() replacement because one compiler kept optimizing out my memset() call and didn't have memset_s(). It slowed my program down a lot. When I looked carefully I saw I was always resetting the whole buffer, even though I was keeping track of how much had been written to it. Fixing that lead to a ~10x speedup (0.1s to process a large word processor document went to 0.01s, occasionally 0.02s).

> Don't load a JavaScript framework for form validation if using `required` and `pattern` are enough. Don't write your own sorting algorithm unless it's faster than qsort(). Don't write your own data storage engine if SQLite covers your use case.

Most software is made by stitching together off-the-shelf components. I don't think people on the web need a warning about not writing too much custom code. The HN complaint about the web is regarding bloat from people who walk the mainstream road of web development. Loading a bloated framework to do whatever is an example of such mainstream development.

That's an interesting example, probably most software products featured on HN are less complex then Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 in core logic, perhaps not in every aspect.

It may be non-trivial to dig yourself out of a performance hole if you didn’t account for performance at all in the design. The pervasive idea that you can make it fast later virtually never pans out.

In many cases, taking performance into account up front adds little overhead and won’t appreciably affect the design. But, if you codify some algorithmically inefficient approach into your public API, you’re going to find that hard to unwind. The engineering team should advocate for that when designing the product.

In enterprise software, optimizing performance usually means removing the custom stuff.

I think it's the opposite. With exception to startups like Bun, it's big businesses that can marshall enough financial justification to do high-performance rewrites and maintain custom code.

A common complaint on HN is bloated web performance. Surely we don't think the web is bloated because of too much custom code as opposed to too many off-the-shelf components?

The devs. They have the true power to do something about it. Basically, that way you tighten that iteration loop for optimal efficiency to nearly nothing.