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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> when what you have will do

The problem is that it doesn't. Software developers get the latest hardware, either because they like it ("it's my job") or because their company pays for it. As a result, they write software that works on their hardware, which is obviously more forgiving in terms of performance. Eventually, everybody has to update their hardware because their current hardware can't load a simple website or a chat app.

I can see a huge difference when loading website on my work computer vs my personal computer. Just last month my weather forecast app was updated and became literally unusable on my phone. Of course I can't use the old one anymore, so I don't have access to the public national weather forecast app. It works great on more modern phones though... showing exactly the same data as the previous app, but... I guess it looks more modern?

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These software “engineers” that insist on the latest-specced toys are part of the problem. By not living up to their imagined title and actually engineering within constraints (constrained hardware performance which would beget more efficient software), they’re just punting and saying “oops, -I- didn’t do this”. But they’re not engineers and never will be until they take some responsibility for being a partial cause for the current mess.

As a software engineer, I insist on giving developers high-end laptops. The reason is very simple: a lot of development environments are very heavy to run, and developers should not waste time on their development tools running slowly. I also don't want developers to disable tools that are meant to keep an eye on the quality of the code. High-end laptops generally serve well for development for up to 5 years.

Developing on high-end laptops should definitely not be an excuse to deliver slow software, and in the teams I work in, we do pay attention to performance. You are right though, a lot of software is a lot slower than it should be and my opinion is that the reason is often developers that lack fairly basic knowledge about data structures, algorithms, databases, latency,... One could say that time pressure on the project could also play a role, but I strongly believe that lack of knowledge plays a much bigger role.

Now, aside from that, also keep in mind that users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding about what software can and should do (deservedly or not). The more a piece of software must do, the more complex the code becomes and the more difficult it becomes to keep it in a good state.

Lastly, in my humble opinion, the lowest range budget laptops are simply not worth buying, even for less demanding users. I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand middle or high range laptop for the same price. (I am talking here about laptops that people expect to run Windows on, no experience with Chromebooks.)

> users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding

I disagree. For all my life, customers have been asking for as much as they can imagine. Customers wanted flying cars long before they wanted the latest iPhone.

The thing that changed is that we realised that if we write lower quality software that has more features (useful or not), customers buy that (because they are generally not competent to judge the quality, but they can count the features). So the goal now is to have more features.

> I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand

Which is exactly the problem we are talking about: you are pushing for people to get newer hardware. You just say that poorer people should get the equivalent of newer hardware for the poors. But people on a budget would actually be better off if they could keep their hardware longer.

To a point yes. However remember that it takes time and effort to optimize the software down. And if you write it for slower hardware from the start it will be less capable and/or creative. Might be pretty cool still, or even useful. Just not quite as cool and useful.

Can't have your cake and eat it too. It's not all laziness. How long did it take to get Doom to run on a toaster? ;)

> Just not quite as cool and useful.

I am genuinely trying, but I am finding hard to find modern software that qualifies for those words.

Is Slack "super cool and useful"? Is Word/Excel a lot cooler and more useful than... well honestly 20 years ago? Does Microsoft Teams qualify for that? Facebook? Instagram?

I don't think that more powerful hardware allows developer to write "cooler" and "more useful" stuff. What it allows is to write more, faster. Since the early 2010s, it feels like we specialized in writing worse software, but writing a lot more of it.

Not to mention QA machines tend to be a lot cleaner than the real life machines running the app.

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