It’s also important to realize that not every successful or worthwhile business has millions or billions of users that requires extreme optimization and scalability.
I work on internal tools at my company. We know how big our environment is, there isn’t much sensitivity to performance, and we don’t see random spikes that we don’t cause ourselves. Yet I had someone on my team who was obsessed with optimizing everything, to the point of changing his entire code base to a new language that only he knew, so he could save a few milliseconds on paper. Aside from him, no one noticed, no one cared. His optimizations just introduced risk, as he was the only one who could support what he built. When he left, we threw the whole thing away at management’s demand. Had it been a little more simple and slow, someone else probably could have taken it over without as much effort.
My own ethics is mostly about collaboration and confidence. I make sure that I’m ready to offload work whenever I want, and knowing what I ship is working. Other thing are just fun experiments. If it does not impact positively the business/consumers, I’m very happy to not do it. God knows that there’s always something to work on that does.
I work on internal tools at my company. We know how big our environment is, there isn’t much sensitivity to performance, and we don’t see random spikes that we don’t cause ourselves. Yet I had someone on my team who was obsessed with optimizing everything, to the point of changing his entire code base to a new language that only he knew, so he could save a few milliseconds on paper. Aside from him, no one noticed, no one cared. His optimizations just introduced risk, as he was the only one who could support what he built. When he left, we threw the whole thing away at management’s demand. Had it been a little more simple and slow, someone else probably could have taken it over without as much effort.