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jeromebaek | 6 years ago

Sure. But most senior devs are not Tim Patterson.

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toolz|6 years ago

but it's not uncommon for jr. devs to believe every piece of code deserves the most efficient runtime. Runtime speed causing projects to fail is very uncommon. What does add an incredible amount of work time is combing through a codebase looking for micro optimizations. I've never once seen a jr. dev who claimed to care about efficiency start by writing benchmarks over large parts of the system and using that to find real bottlenecks. No, they always comb through the code trying to impress the sr. dev. with their algorithmic knowledge.

TeMPOraL|6 years ago

> Runtime speed causing projects to fail is very uncommon.

That's true. What is common, however, is bad runtime performance losing you users and bleeding your money. Not doing dumb things (like using a list where a vector would do), and taking a moment every now and then to go over your product with a profiler and fix the biggest bottlenecks early, can save you a ton of money in cloud bills (it might even turn out that your product actually doesn't need to horizontally scale at all, giving you further reduction-of-complexity benefits). Or you might end up delivering features that were impossible to do with bad performance (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22712103).

lonelappde|6 years ago

This statement works equally all when you swap "jr" and "sr", so just leave it out