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Comment by globalreset | Hacker News Reader

Scale / data set size tends to expose performance issues. But that's a good problem to have.

Yes, it would be great if all developers could write performant code, but let's face it - there's only so many hours in a day and days in a week. Developers already struggle to keep up with all the required knowledge. It's not that people don't want to be competent. We're building more and more complex things while expanding the number of people employed building software which means average skill level is probably slightly decreasing.

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Part of the point of Casey's videos (Previous one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34966137) is that it _doesn't_ take more time because very often the simple thing is the fast thing.

So if most people unlearned the _more complex_ way of programming, they might end up with simpler _and_ faster code.

>It's not that people don't want to be competent.

There are plenty of devs that are just there for the paycheck and have minimal passion or interest in learning more.

It's often not about learning more, the techniques and methods in Casey Muratori's streams are often very well understood and even taught in school.

Dismissing people as just being there for the paycheck - that's you and every other developer.

The number of people who produce useful OSS projects because they just like the project and aren't filling out resume points to hope bigtech senpai notices them is astronomically small, and usually the sort of political project nobody wants to touch.

True, but it's normal in many professions that lots of people working in it are not passionate and industry just deals with it. We can't expect that average software developer is going to be passionate and spending their weekends honing every-increasing set of skills: technologies, platforms, tools, etc.

Can’t we?

The entire startup ecosystem is based on extracting from the economy people who are motivated, do their work efficiently and learn high skills, and giving them millionaire-or-bankrupt stakes to ensure they’re committed.

The expected value from start-up shares is so low, you're bit of idiot if you're degrading your life for it.

Actual founder? Sure. Early employees get a raw deal. Honestly it better if you earn the most from salary, and invest the extra cash in startups. You'll get more equity.

So can't we just give those well metrics to get under. Or tell them that make it feel "snappy". And not accept the result until it feels good enough.

They are paid to do a job. Just have to specify what that job is in a correct way.

I think its usually that their competence is judged from above based on their speed of development as that's the only metric people above them can understand. So quality is ignored and performance is an aspect of quality - many things can be made to perform ok for the demo and the first 100 users.

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