ProgrammerHumor
iLoveWhenThisHappens
Discussion
In this order, this is actually good project management.
Yeah I’m not sure what the op is complaining about here… does he just want the app to stay as is forever? He might just as well start looking for a new job then.
Is it normal for teams to only manage one app? If an application does its job well with no customer complaints, then it makes way more sense to direct the team’s attention to another application in more dire need of service.
Apps have to make money, and if they're not continuously improved then competing apps are going to steal the spotlight. It sucks and I hate it - but apps sell on complexity and features.
I suppose that’s one of the joys of being B2B, customers here really like (semi-)compartmentalised apps/APIs since it makes their billing easier to manage. That and our value is in the product(s) behind the curtain, the app is just a tool to query the product.
An added benefit of B2B is that migrating from our company’s tool to another is apparently impossible since almost none of our customers have techies on retainer to implement simple API integrations.
An added benefit of B2B is that migrating from our company’s tool to another is apparently impossible since almost none of our customers have techies on retainer to implement simple API integrations.
This is where I come in and charge way too much to do those integrations
It's not only the manpower. I'm a consultant working with integration platforms daily, it's amazing to see how many tools have terrible integration features. Stuff like APIs lacking basic features, or unable to push basic events to a webhook.
Massive disagree here. Apps sell on functionality. When you continuously... "improve"... the app, you end up breaking that functionality in the long term.
The best apps are the ones I've used for 10 years with almost no changes. The ones that continuously "improve" I end up uninstalling within a year, almost consistently.
When the "improvements" don't actually contribute to core functionality, they often just make the app worse, and adding and "improving" features constantly without a good reason is a textbook example of "if it ain't broke don't fix it."
By all means if you find something in an app that needs to be improved, great, do it. But there's a difference between that, and constantly seeking to "improve" or add new features unnecessarily just for the sake of doing it.
You might not represent the vast userbase. If you look at the most popular apps, then nearly all have regular junk updates. Like Office364, Discord, games, Notepad++.
But how many users actually know or care about those updates or their content?
MS frequently change things but people are generally still just using the core features of office, discord might add some new features but I would think most people just care about chatting to their friends, etc. Just because those devs are pushing changes and adding features doesn't mean that they'd drop off if they didn't do that
these new features are for the shareholders, not the users. I have a saas that my company licenses from me and it just works. the only change i've had to make in the past five years was on the backend because they changed their accounting platform.
Fair point. I'm not one who thinks in terms of profits so maybe that's a blind spot for me. But it should be acknowledged what you're doing is selling to the lowest common denominator, people who like when things move around and make noises.
Constant "improvement" just breeds enshittification. Maybe it does make more money. But it does so by making the product worse, more often than not. People who want to just have something that works and continues to work are going to gravitate away from products that constantly change for no reason.
Actual improvements or background updates that don't change anything on the user end are a whole different story, but pointless updates have become the norm to the point that I assume an app has been made worse, not better, anytime it receives an update. I'm right more often than not, with the only exception being apps that need constant updates because they work in conjunction with something else, like my youtube downloader. For the rest? I turn updates off on as many apps as possible and I am much happier for it.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with your points here. But when the CTO considers whether he should buy the full O364 package, then a huge list of features and synergies and empty buzzwords is the way to convince him.
n++ is functionally identical today to when I started using it like 10 years ago lol
Companies lose unhappy customers. Customers won't stay on new features alone if the app itself is shit.
Then why is Teams so popular?
Because Teams gets sold to businesses by a marketing department not because the bosses organically choose it. See how Zoom took off insanely despite being extremely insecure and not doing anything drastically better.
Exactly: they sell Teams on an ever-growing list of features that convince CTO's that this app can improve efficiency.
Teams is basically a 'value add' when compared to the price of the rest of the MS suite they're selling you, so it's essentially 'might as well use it instead of paying for something else'.
Honestly what is people's problem with Teams? It's not as nice as Discord I guess, but it works perfectly fine for me.
Tech companies have been allowed to make monopolies in digital spaces by politicians and governments not being able to understand what they do and how to regulate it. Look how long it's taken something as blatant as google to get even a look at.
How come so many of yall talk about building apps like there are bajillions of them but every piece of corporate infrastructure is big dog software like salesforce? Like are some of yall just creating a dialogue box that pops up for one step in some accounting software or something and calling it an app?
What do yall build? People use email, spreadsheets, docs and pdfs.
Salesforce is a league of its own. In my experience when working with B2B they basically want very custom logic to be baked in into a UI that resembles spreadsheets or calendars or so on. They could do without it but teaching thousands of people to make excel files in the perfectly same way, even just agreeing to versioning, it's a pain. A client I had in the past had their own proprietary language to abstract writing tax logic for C#, and I had to make that play with TypeScript instead. There's a ton of bad decisions in the wild.
Oh shit that sounds so hard. Rosetta stone type of shit. Thanks for answering thoroughly. I am spoiled helping a one man business and using really well formatted openDBs.
Makes sense. This company had multiple generations of different databases and languages and kept rewriting layers to make things work together or sometimes implemented the same stuff multiple times (even a simple business detail page). All the crust requires new crust to keep the old crust from falling off...
Do you honestly think that no one is developing software anymore because you've heard that Salesforce does everything?
Man those Salesforce salespeople are the best. They've got everyone brainwashed.
using really well formatted openDBs
lucky. my coworker recently retired after 50 years with the company and i had to take over the system he created when he first started. it's a mainframe in a sub-sub basement written in mumps.
You'd be surprised by the number of small/medium companies that have custom app/software made specifically for them. There are a huge number of developers working on systems you'll never ever hear about unless you're working at the specific company it's developed for.
At my very first job, at a ~40 persons company, I spent a year accompanying them to move to an ERP that was being made specifically for them. That included bi-weekly meetings with the developers to make sure everything was developed correctly for the specific needs of the company.
Were their needs actually that specific? Not at all. They spent a small fortune having that software made anyway.
Every interface between company and customer needs some sort of application. Front-end do webpages, for marketing and to actually present the product, both of which are certainly apps. While backend do services and systems, here I lean towards systems being applications, but even microservices can be called apps if a team really wants to.
Even an integration towards one of the big softwares like Salesforce could be called an app. Apple really changed the nomenclature there.
Develop internal software used by 5000 internal employees for their daily business. Somehow the enterprise feels it makes more sense to develop all inhouse than buying some general software. I am all for it ...
An app can be a little script that does one thing, if it does this thing well no need to change it (except security versions and adaptation to new versions of the environment). But an app can be a software used by thousands of people and will need to be always updated to match the evolving needs. The development of such apps can't end by definition
Can't it? In my opinion, that's just misguided corporate thinking. Almost nothing needs to be eternally updated to "match evolving needs"; indeed, I would argue user needs change very, very little over time in most fields, and you would need to wait literal decades for user needs to have changed so much that any meaningful change becomes actually somewhat required.
Like... think of most baseline software most people use. Calculators, notepads, calendars, email... none of that really needs to change. Assuming there are no compatibility issues, you could happily use 30-year-old software that did the job well, and maybe you'd miss a couple bits of nice-to-have functionality, maybe it'd "look dated", but that's about it.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say the majority of the time an existing piece of software receives sizable changes in an update, the net user reaction is going to be negative. Most humans don't like change unless they were actively troubled by the previous status quo. And most users of most software aren't really looking at the minutiae of the software they use: they already learned how to do the stuff they need to do, and that's good enough for them. Any changes, even if theoretically an improvement (and they often aren't, especially if the priorities behind the changes are not aligned with what they personally happen to care about) will unilaterally impose a cost on the user, as they're forced to get used to the new stuff even though they didn't ask for any of it. Unless the change is also eliminating a legitimate pain point for the user, that's usually going to be a "thumbs down". So what exactly was the necessity of changing anything again?
A script does one specific task, typically in isolation.
An app (application) addresses a problem domain, meaning it offers a cohesive set of features to solve related problems, often with user interaction or service integration.
Me making the corners slightly more rounded
My kind of job.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
James Zawinski, 1995
It's sad but your reaction proves that bloating every software with as much features as you can is some kind of natural order.
is gonna make the app slow again ad infinitum
does he just want the app to stay as is forever?
I mean if the app is working as intended and there is no consumer demand to add anything to it then ideally, yeah, it should stay the same. Most people hate it when apps get changed for no reason and something breaks or gets moved, removed, etc.
Well, Redditors for sure do want the app to not change
I mean, do you find yourself using the "news" or "watch" tabs? If cutting stuff like that out meant better performance, I'd be all for it
I think OP is looking at this from a customer/consumer pov. Where the app is slow, it's optimized, then it's filled with features, so it's slow again.
It's not just good project management, it's simple economics
If the demand (features) is constrained by the supply (performance), then increasing the supply will increase demand
No, people want it to work fast. Making it not lag doesnt mean you can pump up it until it starts lagging again. Thats how you loose customers
Features are not demand, and performance is not supply, nor is that implied by the article you have linked.
Those can definitely be connected, but that requires additional assumptions that you have not called out, so your statement demonstrates misunderstanding of the paradox, as well as of the product development.
I mean maybe, depends on what the new features are. If you go from slow app to fast app to app that now has more features but is slow again because of those features, you fucked up.
It could be as long as there’s good product management that defines how fast the app needs to be (non-functional requirements) as well as what it needs to do (functional requirements).
Seems like the OP is implying that the PM/BA doesn’t prioritize the performance requirements of the app which I have often seen product owners do.
What’s more, these non-functional requirements are often reductively classified as “tech debt” and considered the realm of developers who need to fix it on their own time. But it’s a software quality issue and if a performance requirement is not met, that’s a defect just like any functional issue, and it’s thr whole team’s responsibility to address it.
I’ve increased performance by 2000% because the idiot that wrote the old code rewrote it
Yes that's why I love it
Why is the guy giving orders has his skull caved in then
Unrelated to this comic. Stay tuned and find out!
wow you can't just talk about people's appearances like that
True
No, there is no clear instruction in this conversation. My interaction regarding this would have ended after „ok“.
I would kill for a tick-tock cycle of:
sprint 1) new features
sprint 2) debug + perf
seriously, who do I have to murder? I'm ready.
You are aware we are paid to solve problems?
No. You are paid to complain about your product manager even if what he is doing is very logical and natural.
Yep, complaining about PMs is basically part of the job description at this point. Even when they're right, we'll find something to gripe about lol
You are paid to complain about your product manager
I'd do it for cost.
I understand now. Someone has to create a problem for us to solve
If there is no problem, there is no joblem.
Usually if there's no problem, they start wondering why they are paying people in IT and why not cut cost instead.
in web dev, that dev whoever optimized performance by 200% should be promoted to CTO or tech lead lol..
commonly it's usually 1 - 3 % worse you don't get any perf improvements at all.
It can be a LOT when it was poorly made the first time. I once reduced the time of an endpoint from 2 - 3 seconds to 100ms
I once rewrote a complicated SQL request written in the depths of hell, the test went from 60 seconds to perform, to less than 1 second.
I wish I could get there. Spent the past weeks part-time rewriting our complex filter & sort query gen over multiple tables. Had to write an SQL Statement Introspector for my ORM to analyze and advise MySQL to USE specific indices because the query planner would refuse to use them, which had increased the runtime of a given query 30-fold.
Sometimes shit's just insane
Indexing. The answer is always indexing.
https://use-the-index-luke.com
also you need to make sure that the query planner has the necessary information to be able to use the index. Sometimes (especially with complex queries) that means you have to repeat yourself, when even if you say x = 50 and you join tables using x = y so you know y has to be 50 as well, you may have to add y = 50 in the query as well. Normally DB engines are great at figuring this out for you so you don't have to worry about it, but sometimes it really helps to remind them
Yup - the same. Also, we were loading a massive collection into memory before filtering. I'm talking 30000-50000+ objects. My god it was so unoptimised.
me when I apply the recommended index and look like a god
I was once using PHP to import thousands of Excel rows into a database while fixing the data structure at the same time. I had been working on it for a few months and one day realized I had this one section that was causing a massive slowdown. Removed this loop or whatever it was and saw the entire import process go from taking 40+ minutes to about 3 minutes.
I don't remember the exact details as it was about 4 years ago now.
Biggest culprit for us is previous self taught devs doing single row queries inside loops instead of one query and iterating over the results.
Or doing o(n) searches for data that is accessed multiple times and could be easily accessed by key/id if it were a hash map
I rewrote a ZX81 Basic program into a few bytes of machine code and reduced execution time from a few seconds to apparently instantaneous.
You seem to work exclusively with competent devs and I'm kinda jealous.
Just on db querries alone I've seen some wild shit that I optimised to way more than 200% but it's not about me being good, it's about whoever wrote it in the first place not having the slightest clue.
In my case it’s less that the original devs didn’t have a clue and more that they needed to write it before the company ran out of runway. It somehow manages to be simultaneously over and under engineered which is interesting.
Still, onwards and upwards like this accurate monkeyuser.
Same here. Heck, I once reduced round-trip times and the total runtime of a webapp's entire Django test suite by 30%. I only added a single partial index.
I can't find the quote right now but I once read something along the lines of "every dev team should have one tester on a ten year old laptop and if the program doesn't run well on his machine he gets to hit you with a stick"
depends on the program if its a flagship game or a flagship llm if it runs well this man should get 100 million dollars because he did the impossible
Or you can hit the graphical designers with a stick and demand they triple the number of polygons in each model (no one is gonna see the difference)
It's not that hard to improve
Half the time you just had gzip or caching
The beauty of C++ development is that you can often increase performance by entire order of magnitude. two orders if the original author was an intern.
I increased a query speed by 5.4 million percent the other day and the devs ignored my pull request because they have new features to add
You sir, should learn some maths. Improving performance by 200% is making it 3 times as fast. So assuming the app took 1s before it now takes a still whopping .33s
Basically with most stupid pwa that's something that can be trivially achieved by just cutting down one backend call that is slow, not using json, doing server side rendering via a sensible backend language that is not a scripting language, not trying to recreate the relational model in a document storage, not hiding complex and related calls behind a single graphic interface where querying for a Parameter just needed during debugging during first implementation is causing n +1 additional network calls etc. Just the usual suspects I guess.
Optimzing code is such a different skillset than being CTO or tech lead...
Ah, he might just have reduced some of his n+1 problems. There might still be some left
So you want the good programmer to stop programming
programmer hates programming, more at 7
Programming is like golf, you strive to play it as little as possible.
Well, true, the 200% improvement was probably from removing cruft
"Customer complaining the app is slow"
Meanwhile customer using an iphone 3.
they called it the iphone 3g lmao
The "optimized" dude needs bigger bags under his eyes in his second appearance
I once optimized an app by speeding up the load animation 25%. Management was super impressed.
My product manager: “It’s slow, can you improve” “But first, can you add these 2 features”
Features are finished
“Why is it still so slow?! And now we need to do those 2 other features right away”
“Why is it so slow? It’s even worse not!”
Team1: follows best practices and implements everything perfectly.
Leadership: good work guys
Team2: implements everything badly and after 6 months removes faulty code and re implements everything properly this time and also removed sleep commands in the code.
Leadership: great works guys. Team2 "improved" the performance by 1000%. App is quite fast. Team2 showed great resilience and listened to customer feedback. We urge team1 to learn from Team2.
😂
I was in a project once and fixed an issue where it was taking 7 hours to load something. After I was finishing it took 14 min.
The manager went: that's it?
Motherfucker. Still mad about that.
Yeah I took a similar workflow and rebuilt it with data cached locally. Pumped out the result in 30 seconds. Got the same response.
Don't see a problem with that
As a PO I'm guilty of many of the things complained about ITT, but I swear it's upper management that is making me do it.
My team of 5 devs (4 dev + 1 QA) is responsible for 5 separate products. They gave us a project, we quoted a 1 year timeline to deliver, management wants it done in 6 months, and we are still responsible for maintenance and enhancements on the other 4 products.
I imagine my developers want to shoot me
Remember to always sprinkle random wait(500) all over and once a complaint comes, change it to 400. Don't foget to say the refactoring took 2 weeks.
Yeah? Isn't that how it should go? And how nothing seems to ever go anymore?
Ah yes, the sacred ritual of fixing things just to break them again
You guys are getting time to do optimisation?
You need to optimize the code as a part of implementing new features. Sometimes a small lie can save big project. :-)
Imagine taking a messy room, organizing everything neatly away so there is workable space in the room, just for someone to go "o look space" and start putting new stuff in there
That is exactly your job to manage all this, however! This is why we are getting paid. Nobody else wants to do this. :D
What's the problem with that? That's how it's supposed to be o_Ô
The story of Microsoft Windows
Add animations in places where loading occurs
i can confirm its a never ending loop😂
And repeat...
classic case of fast code slow features
So now we are making fun of PM for asking us to do our job?
for those that don't understand. Normally less optimized code is more friendly to use (better to implement features in).
This is how it's supposed to work OP.
The problem is most places skip steps and their process is chaos and they have unhappy customers.
Add more -useless- features.
Or the similar ...
"How long would it take you to do X?"
"A week".
(next day) "Oh, also do V"
(next day) "Oh, also do Y"
(next day) "Oh, also do M"
(next day) "Oh, also do T"
(next day) "Oh, also do Z"
(next day) "Oh, also do I"
(next day) "HoW CoMe iT's NoT rEaDy YeT? YoU sAiD oNe WeEk!!!'
It’s best to have them define “slow”
Are y'all even programmers? This is literally the job
Do what the csgo(?) dev did, lowered the ping by 10 from actual ping just to shut people up
Very similar to consequences of the automatization stuff I do.
- I've improved the process for people working on it, so they can do the job in 25% of the time.
- Good, now we can fire 75% of the people
ಠ_ಠ
You would hate working in the video games industry 😅.
Usually it's all the tracking crap that GTM barfs into an app that makes it slow.
Don't forget using that awesome hip new framework that 'speeds up development cycles' while eating CPU/RAM/ethernet for breakfast.
Completely valid reason for adding new optimized features! ;)
Bro... That is your job. You choose that 😐
wow it's almost like this is your job
devs when they have to do their job
it really do be like dat all the time
It’s wild how often performance gets deprioritized for shiny new features when a 200% boost is literally game-changing for users.
Customer now sees spinny wheel. #closed
My experience with one company was working hard to pay down all the technical debt and delivering a new feature I thought they would love and then getting “ok yeah but this other thing over here is still broken!”
Saying “thank you” is free, y’all
So... You didn't ask what they wanted and are upset when you focused on the wrong thing?
lol what is this dumb meme
Change that last one to "now we need realtime dashboards" to make it really cut deep. Lol
As a filthy non-coding Admin, 99 (98 Charitably)% of all features on almost any suite of software you can get are either actively harmful, counter-intuitive or at best mildly useful for like visualization or graphical purposes.
The only people who care about this shit are Mid level Execs who want to make themselves look like geniuses.
Literally
Well you wouldn't want to develop more features now...
lulz. and? Better than the other way around.
Manager: “We pay you to do work.”
Software devs: “AaAaAaRgHhH!! 😱”
Please try and get some rest and look after your mental health.
TBH that's basically how it should go... you addressed a key concern and then focused on adding additional value.
Now hopefully because of that performance concern you now have baselines to use for monitoring and for when you perform PE tests for your releases.
Wouldn't want a regression now would we?
Adding more features doesn't make the app slower.
Unless you are shit at programming.
Time to take out the delay in that random loop from early testing
Lol 😆 the fukn loop
HAHAHA!
The joke is that custo.ers are dyipid why don't they fix it themselves?
Me no want to work! Me blame customer for shitty work ethic HAHA!
What is it with people these days hating the people who pay for you to live a life with dignity and self worth. Not everyone gets to exist like that. God bless and I'm happy you have the luxury to crap on others.
Ok so the app was indeed too slow and the point of the app is to provide as much value to customers as possible. I guess I did not know that apps were works of art and that they should not be violated.
this is like your mom vacuuming the house and carpets and when she's done she starts complaining that people in the house are stepping on the carpets.
This happens when the Product Owner has no dev experience at all. When they have some experience, even if its from clasees they took at school, they become more self aware
Why Battery capacity keeps increasing but it still only lasts phones for 24 hours
Among the things that didn't happen it's the most things that didn't happen.
Yeah, this sounds fine
I get the design version of this all the time:
“Users are saying the app is too cluttered looking.”
“Okay. I reorganized the layout so it’s much cleaner.”
“Ooo, white space! Here’s 20 more things I’d like you to cram into the design.”
But as someone else pointed out, this is job security. You want 1000 data points on screen at once so your users eyes bleed? I really do not give a shit, sure, go nuts.
“Improved performance” lmao that’s the funny part of the joke.
improve performance
Introduce loading spinner
That’s literally your job. New features keep you employed.
An app that is getting requests is an app that is getting used. It's a bummer feeling, but it means people want to use what you've made. It's the curse of success
Sounds like you were told the issue and given more work, which is what earns you a paycheck. If that's too bad, you can always opt for unemployment and then bitch & moan how bad the tech job market is, an easy way to hide incompetence.
and a few more gtm tags
Yep. That's the job. Did you think they would just pay you forever now without any more tasks?
my work laptop
The more you add the more you gotta optimize!
and use more water and electricity
Aka Software Dev? What the hell is wrong with OP? This is what we want.
That's the curse for almost every commercial software. There MUST be a new version to sell. It is not allowed to be finished. ;-)
Me: boosts app speed by 200%
Also me next sprint: debugging 12 new features no one asked for 🫠
Linux user spotted.
Not sure what you are complaining about… this is how it should be
So this is why the home depot app sucks
mfw employer gives me work to do and pays me money in exchange for my services
Blinn's Law
What kind of shit show did they deliver in the first place, that there was potential for a 200% performance increase lol. Sure you're going to add more features. What else are you going to do with it?
This is literally the job my dudes
Fortran for the win.
Usually its more like
"customer is complaining the app is slow"
"yeah but we really need these 100 more features"
Product management don't get to feel like they add value and contribute to sprints where people are making performance improvements, clearing tech debt, increasing test coverage, etc. But they can request tool tips, and like a toddler, they can ask if we are there yet repeatedly.
Hey if we don't fix this shit soon, the shitty design and complexity in this critical flow is going to tie us up and hold us hostage.
"Wow that sounds bad, but can we add XYZ to this critical path first? I already promised to ship it by the end of the sprint. K thx bye."
Three poorly planned features later
"WHY IS CRITICAL FLOW SO BUGGY?!?!?!"
Swear to god the number of people in senior management who think tooltips somehow solve all documentation problems is insane. It’s like a lazy bandaid on a poor design.
The problem is that product management is typically non technical. I'd compare them to asking if they can change the bridge from steel to concrete and steel because it's a new feature, not caring if a bridge is going to collapse if the change was made.
But nothings worse than a PM that used to be a developer who starts trying to tell me how to do my job
Sometimes it's not too bad. If they know the code and the product and they became a PM later, then they may have intimate knowledge and can genuinely offer solutions. But when they start saying "you need to do it this way" is when it gets dicey because we may not do it that way anymore.
A good PM will listen and understand the devs without getting in their way. There aren't many of those.
So, the Donkey from Shrek.
“Ok let’s monetize and advertise more so we don’t need to care if this one drops us”
There’s no money to fix tech debt, but the app needs to go faster, and we need to release features faster, maybe we can have more meetings where we discuss how to go faster?
ITHell
My manager asked me to finish up an internal project #1. I tell him I got about 8 hours left on it.
Then he calls me to work through a different project he needs help with. We spend most of the day on it.
Then like 15 minutes later he hits me on Teams "Just wanted to check on project #1 before COB?"
Dude, you were there! I was working on your other thing all day WITH YOU.
5pm on Dec 23rd: "Before we all leave for holiday, can I get a status of Project X?"
8am on Jan 2nd: "I'm just getting settled back in and it looks like there's no progress on Project X? WTF?"
MS Office in 00s.
So true 😂 Fixing the speed? Nah let’s just stack more features on top of the lag and hope for the best
My boss: Then let's scale UP!
Later: Why are we paying $20K more per month for our EKS clusters and $40K more for Mongo!?!?!
Yeah, getting time to improve the code before you add the new features is honestly the dream.
Adobe.
That and when asked about the optimisations, they say "it is slower now".