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  • SSTF@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn’t worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn’t any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      I watch a good deal of his stuff on YT, and despite being I think roughly 20 years younger than him, I agree with his level of shock.

      I used to work for Microsoft.

      I have worked in varying different kinds of software dev, and have been making mods for games basically since I became a teenager.

      … Almost no one optimizes anything these days, in my experience, be it a video game, a database or complex SQL query, … etc etc.

      Most people seem to just be adding technical debt with reckless abandon, and its because management prioritizes slapdash, good enough solutions, over an actually maintainable and performant system.

      This is a huge part of why Windows is a bloated pile of nonsense, which they think they can now fix with even more bloated nonsense (‘Copilot’).

      Tech company managent and C Suite are basically cult members/leaders at this point, and their insanity is literally destroying the world, now that they think they can more or less build their idea of God, if only they can use all the economic capital in existence.

      They’re insane.

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        This is partially why I’ve lost all interest in ultra-realistic, cutting edge graphics. I know that with them comes so much bloat that they are difficult to run, and really I realized how little I care about those.

    • ragas@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Hah! And here I am at a company where everyone does premature optimisations, that end up killing performance because they make the actually needed performance optimisations impossible without major refactoring.

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        He’s actually talked about that other extreme, though I don’t recall which video. Sometimes it will be ultra optimizing something that ends up entirely cut, or optimizing it to the point where it’s inflexible.