>When someone smugly says "micro-optimisations don't matter, networks are great, CPUs fast and memory plentiful", proceeds to make an app one degree more complicated than Hello World use 4 GB of RAM and drain half my battery, I'm having dark thoughts.<p>TBH I don't think those are the same person. Lots of apps glued together by developers who never think about micro-optimizations, maybe under severe time crunches without QA teams or PMs who don't care and managers who chose to go with the lowest bidder, but sure, let's blame the developer.<p>I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.
Add in the issue of change for the sake of change. I'm older, and wear hearing aids. Today, there was an app update that added nothing new, but it did rearrange the GUI. It's not better, it's just different.<p>Being a techie, it's no problem for me. But: how many nontechnical, elderly people are going to be lost?<p>Stupid management? New UI designer wanting to prove themselves? Don't know, don't care - I played dumb and sent in a confused complaint.
I do find it ridiculous just how big mobile applications have gotten. Why does the UPS app have to be over 100 MB? It's got maybe a couple dozen unique screens visible to the user, few image assets, and mostly just settings, and account login, text entry, and pulling results from the web. It's not unique to UPS, most of the apps on my phone are of that size magnitude (Amazon is almost a quarter gigabyte with data), it was just a convenient choice because of how simple the app <i>seems</i>.<p>That being said, the oddest-to-me thing in this article is a bank call center not being open 24/7.
In my experience a lot of these kinds of messed up priorities tend to come from managers and PMs, not engineers. A lot of engineers would find it a fun challenge to support old devices and optimize the hell out of your app, but they just aren't given the opportunity.
My experience as a dev is that it's not devs not wanting to fix those issues it's decision makers that can't sell it upwards.<p>"We spent x weeks working so users with low memory space can update" is like unsellable and will get you laughs as a response.<p>On top of that, reality is that this effort is rarely deemed worth it in money terms. How many users are gonna change bank for that?<p>And don't get me started on QA.<p>Software is complicated and it's good and complex as the organizations making it, we devs are just one part of the problem.
Author here. I did not expect to see my post on HN!<p>It was a rant, I was venting, it’s not supposed to be an objective statement about the state of tech. It’s shouting into the void about the things I find unfair and unbearable, I don’t think it’s a great HN material.<p>I made up parts of the story because it didn’t happen to me and I didn’t want to share details of somebody else’s situation.
There is one way to pay rent which requires no RAM or CPU cycles: write a check, and mail it. In my experience, most payees accept the date a check is mailed as the date of payment. (There may be exceptions to this, and I'm not sure what, if any, protections the law provides, so it may not be a valid fallback.)<p>In general society needs to maintain these low-tech fallbacks to high-tech "improvements". For example, we should keep taxis (that can be flagged down with your hand, and paid for in cash) and not rely solely on Uber, Lyft, etc. We should keep the ability to order from a human at restaurants. We must resist putting the smartphone into the unreplacable critical path of human life. To do so values technology above the value of human life.
> I made that up. Not all of it, parts of it happened.<p>> I'm just ranting because it makes my blood boil.<p>So now we are just making up hypothetical scenarios and getting mad over them?<p>Tech people really need more hobbies.
I have had insane numbers of problems being someone who travels/moves countries a lot with banks wanting their app to 2fa before allowing transactions, the app not working, my phone dying just when I am trying to pay my bill at a restaurant and getting my card declined, my ATM card also not working and then the website locking me out and requiring me to.... use the app to generate a 2fa code... from the phone... that just died.... on and on.<p>I was once trying to update my address so I could get a new bank card shipped to me as the old one was expired and I had just moved. I could not update my address beforehand because... I didn't know what my new address would be until my arrival in that country and my apartment hunt was successful. Once I tried to login, I got locked out, and upon trying everything I could to remember a special recovery code that I could not find written down anywhere, I called the bank and they said they would send me a new code by mail. But I couldn't get my code by mail because... I no longer lived at the address on file. They said sure you just need to login to update your address. Which I couldn't do. But they couldn't just send a code to a new address from someone over the phone, that wasn't secure.<p>I forget how I got out of that one.<p>I've basically checked out of all this at this point. I need to get off my ass and move my money better/differently because I've started to see a day where I can't prove who I am and I live somewhere where I can't walk into a physical location to do so. It's more than a bit scary.
This is an HSBC problem, not a developer problem. The banks awful tech is not news. They have to pay out a lot of fines for money laundering or whatever. They offer no competitive advantage in international banking over wise, revolut, etc
One of the reasons I have refused to switch to HSBC's app is because I refuse to take up space on my devices with software that shouldn't exist.<p>I remember when HSBC had a website which did not require JS to use it.<p>Dark thoughts indeed.
> When someone smugly says "micro-optimisations don't matter, networks are great, CPUs fast and memory plentiful", proceeds to make an app one degree more complicated than Hello World use 4 GB of RAM and drain half my battery, I'm having dark thoughts.<p>I don't think that's really what's happening. What i think is happening is much worse, sadly.<p>"developers" saying stuff like "micro-optimisations don't matter" implying there has been an understanding on what optimisation means and then a negative evaluation. which might be a defendable position.<p>what I observe instead is the "businessification" of the craft of software engineering and computer programming in general.<p>Whereas 15-20 years ago it was "cool" to ship fast software, nowadays what's "cool" is focusing on "delivering business value" which basically boils down on pushing out features, completing user stories, adopting the new hot thing (AI anyone?), taking part to the next sprint plan and then do it all over again.<p>As a system engineer (I don't write software for a living, i manage infrastructure) what I see in many (most?) of my colleagues is essentially getting "good enough" on the technical side (meaning, i know enough of the language/framework/runtime we use at work to shi^H^H^H deliver new features upon request) and then one gets promoted on the basis of the thing they deliver. Don't even get me started on developers being limited by their runtime: If it's not in $language it doesn't exist.<p>Making software fast and lean largely plays no role in somebody getting promoted. Most software engineers usually can't estimate how much memory their software will require, not even ballpark estimate.<p>This means that the industry is essentially "self-optimizing" for shitty software engineers.<p>These observation come from almost 9 years in the industry and more than one time me having to pull out a profiler in order to point developers to the part of their software is not working appropriately... Only for them to discover the concept of "software profiler".<p>(btw, I think there's a huge risk AI is going to make this worse)
"How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?"<p>You can thank Google for this. Their V8 JavaScript engine now controls the web at the expense of RAM. It was mainly the security feature's that I found value from with V8 but the horrible development practices that followed nullified them. I don't look at Google or Big Tech with infallible admiration and I deeply regret ever doing so.
I read a bunch of comments defending the devs that shouldn't be blamed, but I can't stop remembering what happened to me some time ago. First time I login on an online banking service, it required a otp code sent via sms, nothing special except there was a countdown on page, and not the one for requesting a new sms, but a countdown of 30 seconds for inserting the received code. I received the code 2 minutes later. Maybe one shouldn't blame the devs but I can't think of myself in the same situation trying hard to convince the manager/designer that that was a very bad idea, how bad you should be at ux to accept to implement something like that? Having said that the article mentions and blame Javascript, like everyone's love to hate, but in the meanwhile my "performant" google app on my iphone is almost a 1gb in size
Did we or did we not pick a system where you spend the least you can get away with spending and charge the most you can get away with charging, and decide that system was the only possible way for everything everywhere from the utterly frivolous to the life-sustaining to run?
The fundamental problem here is that in any industry where the software is an add on, and not the primary product (like banking), the company isn't punished in their pocketbook for being bad at it. So they have no incentive to make it better.<p>They know you'll come back regardless.
I don't think the HSBC app added anything new of value in years. It's a banking app, once it works it's done... but they keep sending updates that apparently only change the UI.
> It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?<p>OP is using a potato with the same amount of RAM as a smartphone from 2012 and is complaining about performance issues.<p>You pay your rent. Send a check. Pay it when the call center is open and don’t wait until the last minute.<p>Don’t blame your phone or the technological progress of modern software.
Can't you use a Debit Card?<p>When I was younger I used to use my banking app all the time and complain when something didn't work.<p>Now I realize it is not THE CENTER of banking, it's just a nice to have.<p>Protips: You can make wires at atms, you can send your bank details and have them do a pull. You can call the payee and let them know a wire is on the way and should arrive in x business days. You'll be fine.
Multiple teams working on different features without communication/collaboration, leadership changes, growth hiring (brings in a lot of devs each with their own style, culture, experience or lack of), with not enough time to learn existing guidelines because they need to hit the ground running.<p>The solution to all of these is: slow down.
With such problems it is likely that the devs do care but managers and investors do not. Perhaps freedom from constant updates and bloat might become a desirable feature that commands premium pricing?
As someone in tech over 40, and who previously worked in embedded systems, it amazes me how little attention we pay to efficiency today.<p>I now work with teams who will think nothing of spinning up 1000 containers with 2000 vCPUs to run a microservice.<p>I've previously been told developer availability and developer convenience are higher priority than performance. But frankly, when you're spending millions on compute, perhaps reducing the cost of compute might be more important than finding devs?
About once a year my bank full fills they legal obligations and asks me a bunch of questions, mostly revolving about my need for cash. One of the final questions is "Why do you need to withdraw cash?" There's a bunch of reasons listed, guesses of some lawyer or banker as to why a person might need cash, e.g. "give to my kids", "pay my friend back a loan" and then there is the "Other, please fill in the text box". That is the one I use, every time, because they do not expect my answer, even if they blood well should. Every time I answer: "Because I do not trust you to keep the payment system running 24/7/365, and again this year you have prove my scepticism correct".<p>We keep pushing for more and more digital, always online solutions, but I'm an SRE. I know that we can not have 100% uptime, not for anything. Yet more and more solutions are designed without that in mind. There are no backups. When the digital solution fail we are screwed, because the systems are designed backwards. The digital, online version is the add-on, not your only option.<p>I don't blame the developers. I blame business people, politicians and managers for releasing ill conceived systems who's flaws are obvious to any technical minded person. I blame developers for a host of different problems, mostly related to not being able to code.
I don't expect this to go over well but...<p>... it's not like our best and brightest devs are the ones working on web and phone apps, especially boring ones like yet-another-banking app.<p>But then there's the fundamental problem of management never allocating enough time for fixing things, doing them right the first time, or constraining features to result in an achievable goal especially given the resources they're usually working with.
I swear, it's fucking garbage collection. I had to something fairly non-trivial in Java once for a phone app in 2011 (it was a simple OCR algorithm that could read text from low-res images as long as said text was printed by a machine with a clean seriff-like font and only contained numeric digits laid out in a grid) and I remember the biggest problem was that it kept running out of memory and the only solution was to go through the program and manually null every reference the moment it was no longer needed because the GC on android back then apparently was not very good at figuring these things out itself. Which is actually a lot more complicated than deleting pointers in C++ is because there are no destructors in java.<p>It made a huge difference in terms of execution speed too, IDK if phones with solid-state storage use swap partitions like PCs do but that little phone was definitely struggling with something that went away when I did the one thing the garbage collector is supposed to save me from doing.
I'm not a huge fan of the "let me tell you a story - ok, that was all made up"-hook. I was interested in finding out what the root problem was but instead this was all we got:<p>> I made that up. Not all of it, parts of it happened. And worse stuff happens, like when I needed to pay to get my visa and the website just wouldn't work if your phone was a few years old. It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?<p>"Worse stuff" and a vague story (no link/source/reference) about not being able to get a visa due to an old phone. A claim I have no reason to doubt exactly, except now this is the second time the article has mentioned a problem that it hasn't explained (to be fair, the first example was made up /s).<p>I tire of all the "javascript sucks" people and I assume this is one of them, looking for any reason to try and shit on javascript. The last line:<p>> It'll mostly consist of refactoring Javascript codebases with no test coverage.<p>It makes absolutely no sense, it doesn't flow with the rest of the paragraph, and other than a swipe a JS devs for not writing tests (? I assume that's what it's saying?) it doesn't say anything or make sense in context.<p>Are some JS sites bloated? Yes. Do some people force JS or SPAs in where they don't belong? Yes. But everyone who points this out [0] normally just says "It's bad, and should stop" without any plan forward or alternative that actually makes sense. "Let's all go back to SSG-only web pages, you don't need any JS" is just silly and no one can agree on the right amount between "No JS" and the (often) strawman "huge JS page that doesn't need it".<p>> Benchmarks and guidelines you've read probably say "if you show any text under 5 seconds on newest iPhone on 5G connection you get 100% Performance Score, blue ribbon and your parents will be finally proud of you" because otherwise the biggest websites build by The Best Engineers in the Entire World will not get anywhere close to 100%.<p>What's even being said here? I'm not aware of any benchmark that says first paint <5s is good. Also, right after that they say:<p>> THE LIMIT IS BASICALLY THE SPEED OF LIGHT, A LITERAL SPEED OF LIGHT AND YOU SAY TAKING 10 SECONDS TO DISPLAY 1000 WORDS OF TEXT AND TWO IMAGES IS SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF?<p>Is it 5 seconds? Is it 10 seconds? Is it completely made up?<p>Lastly, back to the title:<p>> I can't pay rent because devs just don't care<p>No. Users don't care. They just don't. You are in the minority. Oh, I'm sure you might even get the majority of people to agree that they think "websites are too slow" or "bloated", you will not, however, get any of them to change their behaviors. People vote with their feet and wallets and they have near-unanimously declared they prefer bloated SPAs over alternatives. People say a lot of things, then turn around and do something different. Look no further than reddit. There is a non-SPA version of the site yet the majority of people on the web use new reddit over old reddit [1]. I'm sure if you showed some of those people old reddit they might consider switching but they aren't seeking it out.<p>[0] Which, this post does not even fully touch on. There are legitimate issues but this post just hand-waves its way to "JS bad mmk?".<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/zvbm6q/what_percentage_of_users_use_old_reddit_vs_the/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/zvbm6q/what...</a>
A stirring polemic but ultimately sophomoric - made up[1] a story to valiantly declare support, for something no one doesn't support, and disdain for those who do not support it.<p>If you have a 2 GB phone (2018 era) and expect it to fit a multitasking OS, and every web page to work always, bless.<p>(how do we know "Aw, snap!" means your phone is too old and/or out of RAM and if it does, its the sites fault?)<p>[1] "I made that up.", beginning of ¶2