[kilburn]

Hey, I said "users", not "evil hackers doing weird things" ;)

The sad thing is that this isn't entirely a joke. I've brought up those kind of issues in executive meetings in the past (trying to exterminate battery-draining animations being a particular crusade of mine).

The response is a mix of blank stares, mild interest... and a quick dismissal from the top dog in the room, along the lines of: "That's certainly something to consider, but I think we have more pressing matters in our hands. Let's keep these on the back burner."

I don't even try anymore :(

[KronisLV]

I've definitely run into this in my own past as well. On one hand, you can understand the business incentives - ship something relatively quickly, have it look good enough to attract attention or at least not scare anyone away.

For example, compare the front pages of SourceHut (a lovely and lightweight project) https://sourcehut.org/ and GitLab (a really good self-hostable solution with plenty of features) https://about.gitlab.com/

One of those would capture the attention of most people better, so that's what the market will optimize for at large, unfortunately also sometimes pushing focusing on other things with less visibility (to the average user) to the back.

For the simpler things, not asking for permission can be a good idea (depending on the environment and circumstances) - a line that i heard in a software development conference once was: "You don't ask your manager for permission to write tests for your code, so why should you for making other similar decisions that are essentially just doing your job well?"

Of course, then you also become responsible for the potential impact of those changes and things going wrong, so it works better on simpler cases/optimizations and only as long as the things you're changing are simple enough to have almost no impactful bugs or you have enough tests in place to catch any.

Other times you can succeed by adopting a data driven approach and a healthy helping of taking initiative: "Hey, our automated performance tests indicate a regression in page load times of X% after version Y, which, according to these random but serious looking studies and posts might result in lost potential conversions and could cost us Z$ the following year. I've described these problems and what to do in Jira issue #W and have escalated the priority to 2, so that's what i plan on doing this week. Any questions?"