Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality to your goal in a way that is both economical and is very good at reaching the stated goal.

Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.

In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.

Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?

It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).

I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.

> I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality

I'd phrase it differently: Civil engineering is fundamentally about understanding trade-offs within hard constraints. You have materials of known strength, known wear, and known properties (compression vs shear). It's boring by default because the physics don't budge.

A lot of software engineering, web and SaaS development in particular, hasn't had to confront comparable resource limitations. For decades we've had (for practical purposes) an infinitely fast calculator, practically infinite supply of active working data and and infinite amount of them to chain together. So, without constraints people have just run wild.

But here's where it gets interesting from my perspective: when you point out the resulting bloat (200ms to open a Reddit comment), many developers will defend it not as a technical failure but as correct business prioritisation. "User hardware is cheap, developer time is expensive" or "users will upgrade their devices anyway"—essentially externalising the performance cost onto users rather than absorbing it as an engineering constraint.

That's the fundamental difference. An automotive engineer can't build a 20-tonne car and tell customers to buy stronger roads. But we absolutely can ship bloated software and tell users to buy faster computers, more bandwidth, better phones. And for a long time, we've got away with it.

The question is whether that's still sustainable, or whether we're approaching the limits of what users will tolerate.

I think the main issue is lack of competition. If company A makes a 10% worse car that costs 10% more than company B, they very quickly go out of business.

There is no 'Reddit 2' substitute product (or indeed for lots of software), and network effects tend to dominate, so your benchmark is 'is it bad enough so people would rather use nothing than your product', which is a very low bar to clear.

Spot on. And it's worse than that: you're not choosing between a 10% slower product and a faster alternative, you're choosing between a slow product and losing access to everyone still using it. That's not a market choice, it's a hostage situation.

We can see this works in reverse: developer tools, CLIs, and local apps where network effects don't apply (ripgrep over grep, esbuild over webpack) performance actually matters and gets rewarded. Developers switch because they can switch without losing anything. But Instagram users can't switch to a lighter alternative without abandoning their social graph.

This is why the "developer time is expensive, user hardware is cheap" argument only works in the absence of competition. In genuinely competitive markets, efficient code becomes a competitive advantage worth investing in. The fact that it's "not worth optimising" is itself evidence of market power, not sound economics.

Your automotive analogy actually understates it: imagine if switching to a better car meant your old car's passengers couldn't ride with you anymore, and that's closer to what we're dealing with.

Network effect is basically the same thing as urban agglomeration in real life. The value of a city is from all the people aggregating together to provide goods and services and people are worrying about the housing crisis.

So what is the correct solution to all of this? I would be tempted to reach for a land value tax except this doesn't really apply to cyberspace. The only "land" is built by the platform themselves, but at the same time the platform isn't solely responsible for all the value generated on the platform. So, maybe we should tax network effects.

A major difference is what costs money.

A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.

The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.

Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.

In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.

When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.

I think the argument you present here makes an MBA kind of sense, but with the benefits of hindsigh, we know exactly what sort of costs this encurred.

People hated the redesign, and stuck with the old reddit UI as much as possible. The company lost a ton of benevolence. Alternative frontends sprung up overnight, which used the API.

Management was probably faced with the dilemma that if new features were only developed for the new UI, a significant chunk of the userbase would not get to use them.

This was probably one of the major factors on the decision from Reddit to kill the API, which created a ton of negative sentiment, some of it probably lingers to this day.

I'm sure a lot of people were either driven away entirely or significantly reduced the amount and quality they posted. While numerically small in number, we know that most of the quality content comes from very few people.

Reddit might have more users now than any time before in history, but I'd argue user satisfaction and engagement is lower than the days before, and the quality of the content and discussion to be had means most people don't bother.

At the big tech firms, there are engineers looking for software fixes that make tiny efficiency improvements that can save lots of money at scale.

Meanwhile, Google and Apple look for whatever ways they can to improve battery life on their phones.

But for many other developers, this isn’t going to save money or increase sales, so the incentives are more indirect.

> At the big tech firms, there are engineers looking for software fixes that make tiny efficiency improvements that can save lots of money at scale. Meanwhile, Google and Apple look for whatever ways they can to improve battery life on their phones.

While this is true for parts of these companies, I think the user experience with their products makes it clear that the performance focus only goes in a very select few areas.

Perhaps my favorite Google example is the absolute dogshit performance of Google Home devices. By any objective metric, these are fairly capable computers (quad-core arm64 processors) running a tiny number of apps and yet their UI is still incredibly sluggish. Better yet, these are basically the only real-world devices that run Fuchsia - they should be shining examples of the performance of a brand new OS and yet they are anything but.

Yeah, it's a big company and dedication to performance is uneven.

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