alt Hacker News> There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually.
for Google and other hyperscalers, not for mom and pop shops and electron apps.
> There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
Nonsense. You seriously think there’s some arcane knowledge in optimizing things? Sure, if you’re pushing microseconds and optimizing network stack just to squeeze last drops out of it. But majority of software runs stupid quadratic loops, overuses map/filter/reduce, instantiates too much and is bloated with useless features. It takes one capable programmer to optimize this mess to roughly 90-98% of what’s possible. It takes world class to squeeze last 2%, but majority of software doesn’t need or care about it.
No, I don't think there's particularly arcane knowledge in optimizing things! That's rather my point. It's not even hard to learn, but the current developer culture is one that treats learning anything outside of their framework as a bogeyman. There are real game developers, with jobs, who are paid many tens of thousands of dollars, who do not even know what an "int" is, because it's all been abstracted away for them and they think that understanding why their game runs like shit is something only Carmack himself could handle. In reality, we could easily produce enough capable programmers to create performant software, we simply choose not to as a culture.