> Most software houses spend so much time focusing on how expensive engineering time is that they neglect user time. Software houses optimize for feature delivery and not user interaction time.

I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric

This has been common wisdom for decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.

There was a thread here earlier this month,

> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178

Section of the top comment says,

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

and the reply to it has,

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

I worked in e-commerce SaaS in 2011~ and this was true then but I find it less true these days.

Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals?

I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.

Contrary, every consumer facing product I've worked had no performance metrics tracked. And for enterprise software it was even worse as the end user is not the one who makes a decision to buy and use software.

>>what you mean by software houses

How about Microsoft? Start menu is a slow electron app.

> I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the repeated quote about how Amazon loses $X million for every Y milliseconds of page loading time, as an example.

This is true for sites that are trying to make sales. You can quantify how much a delay affects closing a sale.

For other apps, it’s less clear. During its high-growth years, MS Office had an abysmally long startup time.

Maybe this was due to MS having a locked-in base of enterprise users. But given that OpenOffice and LibreOffice effectively duplicated long startup times, I don’t think it’s just that.

You also see the Adobe suite (and also tools like GIMP) with some excruciatingly long startup times.

I think it’s very likely that startup times of office apps have very little impact on whether users will buy the software.

Clearly Amazon doesn't care about that sentiment across the board. Plenty of their products are absurdly slow because of their poor engineering.

The issue here is not tracking, but developing. Like, how do you explain the fact that whole classes of software have gotten worse on those "key metrics"? (and that includes web-selling webpages)

An exception that confirms the rule.

Then why do many software house favor cloud software over on premise?

They often have a recognizable delay to user data input compared to local software

> every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric

Are they evaluating the shape of that line with the same goal as the stonk score? Time spent by users is an "engagement" metric, right?

>I don’t know what you mean by software houses, but every consumer facing software product I’ve worked on has tracked things like startup time and latency for common operations as a key metric.

Then respectfully, uh, why is basically all proprietary software slow as ass?