I don’t disagree with this. Software’s performance enshittification is maybe non intentional per-se, but it’s pretty obvious that devs don’t think they need to optimize until it’s confirmed that their software is insufferably slow. And I mean their software has to be so slow that it loses them customers in droves.
Poor performance then immediately sells more performant gear. Lord knows that if software consumption didn’t rise every year, I wouldn’t even consider buying new gear till my current shit croaked.
True, though it’s a mix of culpability. We wouldn’t be in this situation if devs quit over poor managerial decisions. Devs keep their heads down and do the dirty work, so they’re also culpable in these trends. They don’t deserve defending, they deserve a wakeup call.
EDIT: face it folks, if you do a shitty thing as your job for someone else, it doesn’t absolve you of guilt that it was some else’s idea. You’re still doing the shitty thing. No one gets off Scott free because they’re ‘following orders’.
Its time to stop acting like all game devs are somehow totally free of responsibility from all this.
I say this as a person who at least used to personally know game devs, mod devs, and I have been modding (as in making the mods) games since the mid 00’s.
Yes, of course management is shitheads.
But there are many game devs who don’t removed themselves out to corpos they know will do this dumb shit.
There are many indie or AA or other devs who build games that are a little bit less graphically fancy, but run 3x as fast.
Go right now and play Titanfall 2, built on a fork of the Portal 2 Source Engine variant, and tell me that any modern, comparable game really looks like it is so much more impressive it needs all the horsepower and cost that goes into getting it to run at the same resolution and framerate.
If people wanna know more about the technicals of how optimization in games is largely a lost art now, go check Threat Interactive on youtube, that guy does an amazing job breaking this stuff down.
When possible, use open source software that isn’t developed by commercial entities (yes that also disqualifies all real browsers available - maybe Ladybird will be different? But then the specs themselves for the web are so bloated it takes too long to implement them and you have to cut corners).
Thing with for-profit development is that micro-optimizations don’t make fiscal sense. Say it takes 10 seconds for an API call. That’s too long if it’s supposed to be an interactive website! You spend 4 hours getting 9 seconds off by improving multiple problematic methods. Now the next 900 milliseconds? Maybe that’ll take you 10 hours. Fun? Absolutely, I live for that shit. But in most commercial environments this would be considered a waste of time because I could spend it doing something more impactful.
And anything being twice as fast or memory efficient is usually not noticeable. If you’re going to optimize something, it should be at least an order of magnitude. Therefore everything but low hanging fruits often gets ignored. Usually it’s a case of reconsidering your data structures to be able to use better algorithms, or reconsidering the business requirements to get rid of some processing that could be avoided. The former requires architectural insight not every developer has, plus agreement among devs. The latter may require outright navigating office politics to get product team to drop some low business impact feature requirement that has high impact on performance.
you really need people that want to make good software to get good software, i only use foss for the same reason
idk if ladybird will get better performance than the others though, i honestly think it’s a web framework issue more than a browser issue, barebones lightweight browsers like netsurf are perfectly usable on well made sites like the arch wiki
I think everyone wants to make good software, except upper level management that only cares about the money. But in some companies, your boss or your boss’s boss has some kind of feature roadmap and they get their asses chewed off if that is not met.
I honestly think most people WANT to do good work. But ain’t nobody going to work overtime to deliver a better product with unreasonable timelines. Not unless there’s a heavy stock option plan and you’re in a startup where your input actually changes things.
I don’t disagree with this. Software’s performance enshittification is maybe non intentional per-se, but it’s pretty obvious that devs don’t think they need to optimize until it’s confirmed that their software is insufferably slow. And I mean their software has to be so slow that it loses them customers in droves.
Poor performance then immediately sells more performant gear. Lord knows that if software consumption didn’t rise every year, I wouldn’t even consider buying new gear till my current shit croaked.
More like managers
True, though it’s a mix of culpability. We wouldn’t be in this situation if devs quit over poor managerial decisions. Devs keep their heads down and do the dirty work, so they’re also culpable in these trends. They don’t deserve defending, they deserve a wakeup call.
EDIT: face it folks, if you do a shitty thing as your job for someone else, it doesn’t absolve you of guilt that it was some else’s idea. You’re still doing the shitty thing. No one gets off Scott free because they’re ‘following orders’.
You got it.
Its time to stop acting like all game devs are somehow totally free of responsibility from all this.
I say this as a person who at least used to personally know game devs, mod devs, and I have been modding (as in making the mods) games since the mid 00’s.
Yes, of course management is shitheads.
But there are many game devs who don’t removed themselves out to corpos they know will do this dumb shit.
There are many indie or AA or other devs who build games that are a little bit less graphically fancy, but run 3x as fast.
Go right now and play Titanfall 2, built on a fork of the Portal 2 Source Engine variant, and tell me that any modern, comparable game really looks like it is so much more impressive it needs all the horsepower and cost that goes into getting it to run at the same resolution and framerate.
If people wanna know more about the technicals of how optimization in games is largely a lost art now, go check Threat Interactive on youtube, that guy does an amazing job breaking this stuff down.
When possible, use open source software that isn’t developed by commercial entities (yes that also disqualifies all real browsers available - maybe Ladybird will be different? But then the specs themselves for the web are so bloated it takes too long to implement them and you have to cut corners).
Thing with for-profit development is that micro-optimizations don’t make fiscal sense. Say it takes 10 seconds for an API call. That’s too long if it’s supposed to be an interactive website! You spend 4 hours getting 9 seconds off by improving multiple problematic methods. Now the next 900 milliseconds? Maybe that’ll take you 10 hours. Fun? Absolutely, I live for that shit. But in most commercial environments this would be considered a waste of time because I could spend it doing something more impactful.
And anything being twice as fast or memory efficient is usually not noticeable. If you’re going to optimize something, it should be at least an order of magnitude. Therefore everything but low hanging fruits often gets ignored. Usually it’s a case of reconsidering your data structures to be able to use better algorithms, or reconsidering the business requirements to get rid of some processing that could be avoided. The former requires architectural insight not every developer has, plus agreement among devs. The latter may require outright navigating office politics to get product team to drop some low business impact feature requirement that has high impact on performance.
you really need people that want to make good software to get good software, i only use foss for the same reason
idk if ladybird will get better performance than the others though, i honestly think it’s a web framework issue more than a browser issue, barebones lightweight browsers like netsurf are perfectly usable on well made sites like the arch wiki
I think everyone wants to make good software, except upper level management that only cares about the money. But in some companies, your boss or your boss’s boss has some kind of feature roadmap and they get their asses chewed off if that is not met.
I honestly think most people WANT to do good work. But ain’t nobody going to work overtime to deliver a better product with unreasonable timelines. Not unless there’s a heavy stock option plan and you’re in a startup where your input actually changes things.