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Comment by charlie0 | Hacker News Reader

I've always been tempted to make things fast, but for what I personally do on a day to day basis, it all lands under the category of premature optimization. I suspect this is the case for 90% of development out there. I will optimize, but only after the problem presents itself. Unfortunately, as devs, we need to provide "value to the business". This means cranking out features quickly rather than as performant as possible and leaving those optimization itches for later. I don't like it, but it is what it is.

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> for what I personally do on a day to day basis, it all lands under the category of premature optimization

Another perspective on premature opt: When my software tool is used for an hour in the middle of a 20-day data pipeline, most optimization becomes negligible unless it's saving time on the scale of hours. And even then, some of my coworkers just shrug and run the job over the weekend.

I agree... for a business "fast" means shipping a feature quickly. I have personally seen the convos from upper management where they handwave away or even justify making the application slower or unusable for certain users (usually people in developing countries with crappy devices). Oh it will cost +500KB per page load, but we can ship it in 2 weeks? Sounds good!

Lots of businesses have nearly zero engineering in them and cobble together libraries and frameworks that they sell or rent as software.

On the other end of the spectrum you have companies hiring specialists at all points of the stack to squeeze out the last drops of performance, dedicated perf teams, etc. The latter also typically produce the tools that enable the former to function.

You are completely correct and I really wish you weren't.

Performance is something that needs to be considered throughout the development cycle. If optimization happens at the end then it’s either a rewrite or a minor concern anyway because the building blocks like frameworks and libraries were already optimized. Or the software is just slow but still sells for other reasons.

Totally depends in the business. Most businesses just don't need ultra low ms response times.

Rewriting an app because is too slow is a rather extreme approach. Most of the times it's just a small part of the application that needs optimization and not the entire app.

I'd argue that if the app experiences huge growth, then that's a good problem to have and a rewrite is in order.

This is not about ultra-low responses or anything. Performance is just as much part of an application’s architecture as security or usability are. You can’t add those things at the end, they need to be done iteratively.

So when you say you optimize at the end as needed, you get away with that because somebody already did that job for you.

A) The frameworks and libs are heavily optimized, so that developers deploying them will get the best possible performance just by idiomatic usage and connecting those libraries together.

B) The software itself is not technically challenging.

When A and B don’t hold, ignoring performance will get the project in big trouble.

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