I was in a meeting with a senior software engineer, who makes a shit ton more than me. While sharing my screen he saw flame graph I had for one program I was working on. They asked “what is that?”, I was taken back, and said it’s for looking at which functions are taking more time. Then I was asked “where did you find it?” I was shell shocked, didn’t know how to answer that. Similar things have happened before where I taught them certain things, and they go “great find”, like dude, I didn’t find it just now. That’s basic knowledge if you work with database.
I am not even a developer hire, I’m self learned, and because the company doesn’t have many developers they gave me some of the tasks and I’m doing it because it’s more fun than my job responsibilities, and when I don’t have enough tasks.
You see, performance is rarely a talking point in retrospectives unless its egregious. If you say a piece of compute is struggling the solution is to always buy more compute. It is rare that anyone would think of optimization unless you’re writing libraries.
Which is exactly why western AI companies are bankrupting themselves building data centers while China is easily keeping pace with a fraction of the resources. They’re not magic. They just do basic things like make things more efficient.
Flame graphs have really only been a thing for the last decade or so. The free tooling for profiling code has been shitty and difficult to understand for most of my career. And most companies aren’t willing to pay for it if the product runs “good enough”. These days companies lock down their shit so tight that you can’t even install an unapproved app no matter how free or useful.
I was in a meeting with a senior software engineer, who makes a shit ton more than me. While sharing my screen he saw flame graph I had for one program I was working on. They asked “what is that?”, I was taken back, and said it’s for looking at which functions are taking more time. Then I was asked “where did you find it?” I was shell shocked, didn’t know how to answer that. Similar things have happened before where I taught them certain things, and they go “great find”, like dude, I didn’t find it just now. That’s basic knowledge if you work with database.
I am not even a developer hire, I’m self learned, and because the company doesn’t have many developers they gave me some of the tasks and I’m doing it because it’s more fun than my job responsibilities, and when I don’t have enough tasks.
You see, performance is rarely a talking point in retrospectives unless its egregious. If you say a piece of compute is struggling the solution is to always buy more compute. It is rare that anyone would think of optimization unless you’re writing libraries.
Which is exactly why western AI companies are bankrupting themselves building data centers while China is easily keeping pace with a fraction of the resources. They’re not magic. They just do basic things like make things more efficient.
Or if its employee facing only let it get slower and slower to the point where it takes a minute to update one record
Flame graphs have really only been a thing for the last decade or so. The free tooling for profiling code has been shitty and difficult to understand for most of my career. And most companies aren’t willing to pay for it if the product runs “good enough”. These days companies lock down their shit so tight that you can’t even install an unapproved app no matter how free or useful.