I think you need to work at companies that are large enough to allow for people to dedicate their time to this level of analysis. Smaller companies are too busy to have staff focussing on things like this.
This is a case of eeking more out, optimizing, but the general diagnostician view is deeply needed widely. This industry has an incredibly difficult time accepting the view of those close to the machine, those who would push for better. Those who know are aliens to the exterior boring normal business, and it's too hard for the pressing mound of these alien concerns to bubble up & register & turn into corporate-political will to improve, even though this is often a critical limitation & constraint on company's acceptance/trust.
There's a lot of ultra passing this off comments. No one seems to get it. Scaling up is linear. Complexity & slowness is geometric or worse. Slowness as it takes root is ever more unsolvable.
Cheap money and small, but easyly observable gains made all the ones not knowing better appreciate linear scaling improvements.
This rings immensely hollow to me, & borders on victim blaming. Oh sure; telling the lower rungs of the totem pole it's their fault for not convincing the business to care- for not being able to adequately tune in the business to the sea of deeper technical concerns- has some tiny kernel of truth to it. Maybe the every-person coder could do better, maybe, granted. But I see the structural issues & organization issues as vastly vastly more immense impediments to understanding-our-selves.
There is such a strong anti-elitism bias in society. We don't like know it alls, whether their disposition is classicaly braggadocious, or humble as a dove. We are intimidated by those who have real, deep, sincere & obvious masteries. We cannot outrun the unpleasantness of the alien, the foreign concerns, steeped in assurity & depth, that we can scarcely begin to grok. Techies face this regularly, are ostracized & distanced from with habit. Few, very few, are willing to sit at points of discomfort to trade with the alien, to work through what they are saying, to register their concerns.
> I’m not sure it’s useful to assign unilateral blame to management based on a failure to listen to the engineers
Again, granted! There absolutely are plenty of poor decisions all around. Engineers rarely have good sounding boards, good feedback, for a variety of reasons but the above forced alienation is definitely a sizable factor where engineers go wrong; being too alone in deciding, not knowing or not having people to turn to to figure shit out, to get not just superficial but critical review that strikes at the heart.
This again does not dissuade me from my core feelings on my core point. I think specifically most companies are hugely unable to assess their own products & systems health, unable to gauge the decay & rot within. Whether it's slog or real peril, there are few rangers tasked with scouting the terrain & identifying the features & failures. And the efforts are renewal/healing are all too often patchwork, haphazard, & random, done as emergency patches. These organisms of business are discorporated, lack cohesion & understanding of themselves & what they are. Having real on the ground truthfinders, truthtellers, assessers, monitors- having people close to the machine who can speak for the machine, for the systems, that is rarely a role we embrace, and so often we simply rely on the same chain of management which is also responsible for self/group-promotion & tasking & reporting which has far too many conflicted interests for it to be expectable for them to deliver these more unvarnished, technically minded views.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
We did that (ops, not developing the actual app) few times where app scaled badly
It's a great tool with a low learning curve that just requires SSH.
We're working on applications that's either waiting for the disk, waiting for the db, waiting for some http server or waiting for the user.
None of our customers will notice the difference if my button click event handler takes 50ms instead of 10ms, or if the integration service that processes a few dozen files per day spends 5 seconds instead of 1 second.
I'll easily trade 5x performance in 99% of my code if it makes me produce 5x more features, because most of the time my code runs in just a few milliseconds at a time anyway.
Of course, I'm weary of big-Oh, that one will bit ya. But a mere 3.5x is almost never worth chasing for us.
> At Netflix, we periodically reevaluate our workloads to optimize utilization of available capacity.
The idea being that if you pay for fewer servers you spend less money
If you try to be good at waiting on many things, you can use one machine instead of a hundred
> None of our customers will notice the difference if my button click event handler takes 50ms instead of 10ms
They absolutely will, what
We can't run on one, because customers run our application on-prem.
> They absolutely will, what
How can you be so sure?
Sure, 10ms vs 40ms is measurable, and for the keen-eyed noticeable. But if you're only pressing the button once every 5 minutes, it doesn't matter. Similarly, if the button triggers an asynchronous call to a third-party webservice that takes seconds to respond, it doesn't matter. And so on.
Of course, for the things where users are affected by low latency, we try to take care. But overall that's a very, very small portion out of our full functionality.