> Many devs don't like "bullshitting”
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
In my experience they seem to love this but will call it “thinking from first principles” or something else to make sure they don’t sound like (gag) marketing people.
I have written a lot of JMH benchmarks in the last year to test out claims from developers (some are on my blog, a lot I haven't written about yet), and so much shit that's supposedly "faster" simply isn't.
For example, I had a coworker who would write all this logic into tons of nested and sequential `for` loops, and the logic was disgusting but lent itself well enough to the Java streams API. I brought this up to this coworker, and he said he wouldn't do that because the streams are "slower" and that he "benchmarked to check". I wrote my own JMH benchmark to check and it turns out that the streams (at least for an application like this) are not actually slower than the loops; the two versions ran within about 3% of each other's. I don't think he actually wrote benchmarks, I think he was just lying and wanted me to stop interrogating.
Another one pretty common backing decisions with bullshit or misleading numbers. Like A/B tests that don't cover the whole behavior spectrum or metrics that don't match the point we're making but sound close enough.