7 ms·
Fun story time! Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge
by old-gregg 1y ago
Fun story time!
Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge was just as important as the ability to examine the output of a compiler, every new Intel processor was met with a ton of anticipation, and Carmak and Abrash were rapidly becoming famous.
Anyway, the 22 year old me unexpectedly gets invited to a customer meeting with a large multinational. I go there not knowing what to expect. Turns out, they were not happy with the speed of our product.
Their VP of whatever said, quoting: "every saved second here adds $1M to our yearly profit". I was absolutely floored. Prior to that moment I couldn't even dream of someone placing a dollar amount on speed, and so directly. Now 20+ years later it still counts as one of the top 5 highlights of my career.
P.S. Mentioning as a reaction to the first sentence in the blog post. But the author is correct when she states that this happens rarely.
P.P.S. There was another engineer in the room, who had the nerve to jokingly ask the VP: "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?". They didn't laugh, although I thought it was quite funny. Hey, Doug! :)
- felideon 1y agoSo, did you make it faster?
- old-gregg 1y agoUnfortunately, there wasn't a single bottleneck. A bunch of us, not just me, worked our asses off improving performance by a little bit in several places. The compounded improvement IIRC was satisfactory to the customer.
- ensemblehq 1y agoRE: P.P.S... God I love that humour. Actually was very funny.
- adwn 1y ago> "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?" I don't get it. Wouldn't going from 1 second to 0 seconds add the same amount of money to the yearly profit as going from 2 seconds to 1 second did? Namely, $1M.
- stronglikedan 1y agoyeah it's one of those things that are funny to the people saying it because they don't yet realize it doesn't make sense. I bet they felt that later, in the hotel room, in the shower, probably with a bottle of scotch.
- betterhealth12 1y agoearlier in my career it'd be appealing to make jokes like that, or include a comment in an email. eventually you realize that people - especially "older" or those already a few years into their career - mostly don't want to joke around and just want to actually get the thing done you are meeting about.
- singpolyma3 1y agoYikes. I hope to never need to work with such people
- Otek 1y ago> I bet they felt that later, in the hotel room, in the shower, probably with a bottle of scotch. Geez, life in my opinion is not so serious. It’s okay to say stupid things and not feel bad about it, as long as you are not trying to hurt anyone. I bet they felt great and immediately forgot about this bad joke.
- andsoitis 1y agoTheir joke could have also been interpreted as sarcasm and when you’re going to be sarcastic you want to be doubly sure that you’re correct. But I also concur with you that it is good to bring some levity to “serious” conversations!!
- devnullbrain 1y agohttps://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever/ https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-... Required reading for internet comedians.
- emmelaich 1y agoWorking with a task scheduling system, we were told that every minute a airplane is delayed costs $10k. This was back in the 90s, so adjust accordingly.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- asimovDev 1y agoif you ever remember that engineer's name you should tell them that I found the joke funny
- ctenb 1y agoWhy do you count it as a highlight if your product failed to meet expectations?