Caring About Performance: The New Generational Divide in Programming
Description
A screenshot of a thread from the r/AskReddit subreddit. The post, submitted by user u/Glittering-Air-1927, asks the question: 'What "old person" things do you do?'. Below the post, a comment by user dullbananas provides the answer, 'when programming, i care about performance'. This simple statement has been upvoted 24 times. The humor in this meme stems from the idea that concerning oneself with code performance is now considered a trait of an older, more experienced generation of programmers. In an era of powerful hardware and high-level abstractions, the focus for many newer developers is on rapid development and feature delivery, whereas veterans who started in more resource-constrained environments often retain a deep-seated appreciation for efficiency and optimization. The meme serves as a humorous commentary on the shifting priorities and generational differences within the software development field
Comments
24Comment deleted
The fastest way to feel old as a developer isn't a sore back, it's watching someone import a 2MB library to pad a string and then complain about CI build times
Gen-Z dev: “Why micro-optimize? Just add another node.” Me, the fossil: “Horizontal scaling isn’t a garbage collector for bad algorithms, kid.”
The real 'old person' thing is remembering when we had to count CPU cycles because AWS didn't exist to throw infinite money at performance problems
Ah yes, the classic generational divide: caring about Big O notation and memory allocation is now considered 'vintage' alongside reading physical newspapers and using a landline. Next thing you know, they'll tell us that profiling before optimizing and actually measuring performance metrics makes us dinosaurs. But hey, when their O(n²) algorithm brings the production server to its knees at scale, guess who they'll call? The 'old person' who still remembers that computational resources aren't infinite and that users notice when your React app takes 8 seconds to render a button
Call it "old" until p99 breaches the SLO and Finance forwards the AWS bill - suddenly microseconds have product-market fit
Performance caring: because after 15 years, you've held the pager when 'it'll scale with more RAM' became a multimillion-dollar lie
Old-person habit: I open perf and fix the hot path; modern habit: open AWS Cost Explorer and call it scalability
trying to understand assembly Comment deleted
memory managment Comment deleted
I use very slow devices and I fucking should care about performance Comment deleted
Yes, and I use onion architecture and write clean code Comment deleted
nobody knows what clean code is Comment deleted
well, you're kinda right Comment deleted
Uncle Bob shakes your hand 😏 Comment deleted
TBF, when the eShop is too heavy for the Switch to run without hitches, people should be caring about performance more Comment deleted
And no it's not “the Switch is too weak to render a shop” LMAO it renders 3D games my guy It's “the eShop application is a web app downloading and running several MB's of JS for its unnecessary React FE and they turned JIT off on the Switch browser because they thought it was scary” That shop does not need to have more than a few lines of JS, nor does it need to be a web app ffs just build a shop like you build games Nintendo, clearly you can make those! Comment deleted
dw their recent games are just as shit Comment deleted
I'm just going to say that they're about the only AAA studio delivering polished games, rather than buggy and half-finished They're the only not-indie studio I buy games from Comment deleted
I'm just gonna point towards literally any pokemon game post-2020 Comment deleted
I agree, those suck I used to be a Pokémon fan but not anymore Nintendo however still makes good games, even when TPC doesn't Comment deleted
the good games they publish are contracted though I suppose pokémon is too, so… nevermind actually Comment deleted
I meant their first party games; their Mario, Kirby, LoZ games, those are still really well polished Pokémon is a “second party” game, and also infamously shit especially according to Nintendo fans Comment deleted
I guess but those are rare gems, certainly worth more attention than a crummy e-shop Comment deleted
I wouldn't call some of the bigger game franchises such as Mario rare gems If anything Nintendo first party games are almost always really well made; even if you don't like them you can still notice they're not buggy, the mechanics work well together and they respond to the controls well But this doesn't apply to everything released on their console, nor does this even extend to their so called second party franchises, e.g. external companies that release exclusively with them And Pokémon is an incredible outlier by Nintendo and their second party standards Comment deleted