In this video, retired Microsoft engineer Dave (Dave's Garage) explores why modern computers, despite their massive power advantage over 1990s hardware, often feel slower and more bloated (0:00-0:36). He argues that this is not due to a lack of engineering talent, but rather a shift in industry incentives and development culture.

Key takeaways include:

• Loss of Discipline (0:36-3:06): In the 90s, hardware limitations forced developers to work within strict memory and CPU budgets. Today, developers often rely on the assumption that hardware is "infinite," leading to less efficient code.
• The Cost of Abstraction (4:00-5:23): Modern software is built on layers of dependencies, frameworks, and telemetry pipelines. While these abstractions save time, they collectively create a massive performance tax that users pay in the form of slow load times and high resource usage.
• Misaligned Incentives (5:24-7:02): Organizations frequently prioritize "feature velocity" and subscription metrics over performance, making it difficult to justify time spent on optimization unless a product reaches a critical failure point.
• The AI Factor (9:34-11:21): While AI is a powerful tool for coding, it tends to generate "median" code—verbose, defensive, and layered—which lacks the optimization needed for critical, hot-path operations.

Proposed Solutions:

• Performance Budgets (12:28-13:43): Dave suggests that companies should implement hard, non-negotiable performance budgets for startup time, memory footprint, and CPU usage, treating them as first-class build artifacts alongside functional correctness.
• Dependency Audits (13:44-14:06): Teams should treat every dependency as a liability, questioning whether the cost to the user justifies the convenience for the developer.
• Consumer Advocacy (14:07-15:05): As users, we should demand software that is lean and respectful of our machines, and reviewers should focus more on performance, battery impact, and responsiveness.

(Summary generated by the YouTube AI)

I watched his video the other day.
I would add that management is one of the biggest issues. They just want to ship code and fix it later. Get your software out before the competition no one is spending time on getting it to work correctly.

I create reporting solutions and the time frame I have now is two weeks, I need to have a production ready system in two weeks. Just some context we use to have 6 months to a year a few years ago.
So I have to cram and make massive cuts just to get something ready in two weeks, then we "optimize" fix it in prod...
They are starting to make us use AI, I hope they don't expect us to cut it down by 50% because all that we will ship is crap slop that looks good but has no real function.

Moved to a more appropriate board. I liked the video though.