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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wish Casey would stop making these videos. I'm being completely serious when I say that this kind of knowledge and mindset gives you pretty much a superpower in the industry. Everywhere I go people think I am amazing, even though I just know a few things about performance and low level programming (like, enough to be amazing for "mere mortals", but someone at RAD would snicker at my knowledge). If the industry doesn't care, it's simply a competitive advantage for you as an individual.

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I know what you mean; I’ve made a lot of money by cleaning up other people’s messes. Still, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer a world where software was just better overall and there were fewer messes.

I had a two year stint where I ran around doing "database optimisation" projects that were a week of billable time at consulting rates, and my entire "toolkit" was to simply flip three boolean flags from bad to good values.

Now in the public cloud my gimmick is to switch VMs over to current-generation AMD EPYC models, and then collect my pay-check for the "performance tuning".

The fruit is hanging so low that I'm trampling over it. There's no actual fruit picking going on.

I’ve always enjoyed perf testing and optimization but figured it’d be tough to reliably find clients staying in that niche.

Any tips?

I never got enough of this type myself, they were just random gigs between other types of project work.

IMHO, the IT industry as a whole has internalised wastefulness and accepted poor performance because there's an expectation that "CPU upgrades will fix it". Over five decades that was true, it's just that few organisations have adapted to the new reality of only ~20% uplifts in single-thread performance over the last decade or so.

In principle, there ought to be many more optimisation projects, but unfortunately they're still rare.

My favorite is to raise the Postgres work_mem value until their queries stop using disk buffers.

It won't be changing the status quo anytime soon.

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