Absolutely hilarious and ridiculous to claim that Facebook cares about iOS app performance. In reality they have a few dozen people who care making heroic technical fixes to mitigate the damage of thousands of people adding mountains of mediocre crap to the apps.
If you care about performance from the beginning, you would never even get to the point where you’re saying “oh crap, our messenger app can barely run, let’s rewrite it in C”.
The point is that performance is so important to customer satisfaction and the bottom line that even a horrendous company like facebook would begrudgingly spend time and money to improve performance. If anything your comment reinforces his point.
The point is that performance is so far down the list of things to prioritize that [company of choice] made it to [revenue] without having to care at all about it. It wasn't worth them focusing on until they had already acquired a very large marketshare. Only when already large and successful did the scope and complexity of their system impact performance enough to bother focusing on it, at which point they begrudgingly did.
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Performance is simply a requirement for the product, some products require very good performance, some don't.
Where you fall is a discussion to be had, because like ALL product requirements, it comes with a cost to develop and maintain.
I don't drive an F1 car to the grocery store. I don't take my minivan to the track.
The article above is bad - it treats a conversation about product requirements as an antagonistic space, where voices that may prioritize a feature other than performance aren't making judgements about how to allocate limited resources, but "excuses"... Worse - he cherry picks the most extreme take of those value judgements for his examples as easy targets to attack.
“ Where you fall is a discussion to be had, because like ALL product requirements, it comes with a cost to develop and maintain.
I don't drive an F1 car to the grocery store. I don't take my minivan to the track”
No. The authors point is that you don’t have to drive an F1 car to the grocery store. All you have to do is stop slashing your tires, dumping sugar in your gas tank and driving a Kia.
The amount of mental gymnastics you people go through to keep your delicate little worldview from crumbling is truly a sight to behold. Thank god we have people like Casey in this world to balance out the bell curve.
I somehow don't think I'm the one with the delicate little worldview in this conversation.
I think the delicate little worldview is the folks who consistently refuse to accept that performance just doesn't matter that much.
When performance does matter, it's usually because the value provided by the service is SUPER FUCKING LOW.
like say... twitter, or facebook. Which both are so worthless they can't reliably get users to pay for the service at all, and instead are selling ads to users and need to optimize the time they spend on the site.
Basically - if the difference between a customer choosing your product or not is latency measured in ms/seconds... you sell a fucking shite product.
Late to the party but this is the same point of disagreement I had with the video, though overall it was fine. Why do these performance efforts and rewrites at the companies he listed take years? How complex is the uber eats app anyway? Well, it's because most engineers at those (and other) companies do not care or know about performance, and when it actually matters to the business, have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a slightly better state by the minority who do. It won't last long (hence the continued twitter examples).
If you care about performance from the beginning, you would never even get to the point where you’re saying “oh crap, our messenger app can barely run, let’s rewrite it in C”.