| We can absolutely go into a long side-discussion about units and how most imperial units are also clearly just a constant-factor away from SI units and nobody would argue they are the same unit, but I don't think any of that actually matters. It's semantics. When you are an expert, nearly by definition the average person you're talking to is less well read on the subject than you, the expert. Because of this, it's extremely important to be able to communicate with clarity and patience. Your expertise doesn't matter if you can't make yourself understood, and it's not reasonable to expect people around you to share your expertise, so you need to adapt the message. Communication in general is easier the fewer concepts you invoke. In almost all situations it's better to be mostly correct and well understood than to be perfectly correct and not understood at all. Even if you can expect most people to have an understanding of SI units, far fewer will have an intuition for them (because they aren't working with them daily). Everyone has a basic intuition for big numbers though, so if you want to say "this is bad", show them a big number; the bigger the better. It can still be correct and make a well founded argument, but presentation matters a lot more than you'd think for convincing someone. In increasing order of likelihood it will convince anyone: The new solution adds a 15ms latency, whereas our usual requests have a 2us latency. The new solution adds a 15ms latency, whereas our usual requests have 0.002ms latency. The new solution is a factor 7.5e3 slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency. The new solution is 7,500 times slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency. The new solution is 75,000% slower than the existing solution, which has a 2 microsecond latency. What is said is basically identical in each version, but the presentation puts an increasing emphasis on just how big a difference this is by literally showing a big number. |