Security
Post #7145 · source on Telegram
Intern Proposes Disabling Authentication for Performance Gains in PR
Description
A meme with the caption text 'When the intern sends me a PR explaining why exactly we need to disable authentication to improve performance' above a photo of two men wearing white hard hats at a construction site. One man is showing a document to another who is reading it with a concerned expression. The meme perfectly captures the horror of reviewing a pull request from a junior developer who genuinely believes removing security measures is a valid performance optimization strategy
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The intern's performance optimization roadmap: Step 1: Remove auth. Step 2: Remove logging. Step 3: Remove the database. Step 4: Achieve 0ms latency on a 404 page
The intern's PR is technically a denial-of-service attack on their own career
Yes, dropping auth will shave 20 ms off the p99 - right before the incident report adds 200 hours to the pager rotation
Nothing improves performance quite like removing all those pesky security checks - just ask anyone who's had to explain to the board why their 'optimized' API became a public data buffet after the intern's 'performance improvements' went live on Friday afternoon
Ah yes, the classic 'remove authentication to fix the N+1 query problem' approach. It's like solving memory leaks by disabling garbage collection - technically it works until you realize you've just traded a performance issue for a career-limiting move. This is the kind of PR that makes you wonder if the intern's previous experience was exclusively with localhost:3000 where the only user is 'admin' and the password is 'password'. At least they documented their reasoning, which is more than can be said for the senior who once commented out all the try-catch blocks because 'exceptions were slowing down the happy path.'
Intern perf hack: shave 0.1ms auth overhead, unlock 'SQL injection at scale' for true horizontal throughput
Sure, disable auth - P99 drops to 0ms and our CVEs per second goes asymptotic
Tempting: rip out OIDC/JWT verification and watch p99 fall - and our SOC2 report with it