[geraldwhen]

These are good performance improvements, but they clearly come at a cost. Race cars are faster than sedans, but the tires fall off and they explode without a team of engineers supporting them.

The best people I can hire can mostly use a computer. They can’t build something like this, or even build upon it. They need recipes to reuse to accomplish tasks, and the more something is custom, the harder it is to teach.

And product only cares about performance when a customer mentions it, which is almost never.

I long to spend time tuning race cars, but mostly I assemble sedans.

[austin-cheney]

As someone who wrote JavaScript professionally for 15 years, but no longer, the greatest problem with that line of work is poor preparation. Hoping a collection of frameworks fills that gap without human intervention isn’t working. Most people doing this professionally have absolutely no idea how any of these technologies work. Being able to read and turn on a monitor presents an exceptionally low baseline considering the level of compensation.

Most people capable of writing original software can easily apply the things I suggest, but most people writing JavaScript are not capable of writing original software. That doesn’t mean guidance for superior performance is out of alignment. It means there are fundamental problems with hiring and training.

Using your example I once saw a Puerto Rican racing team make a lot of money with their custom car. They took an old 80s Mazda small sedan and dropped in a large Ferrari engine and customized the suspension. This is something innovative they did to make money by winning competitions, because that pays better than just changing tires. Shops that only change tires or change oil have that does to a science to maximize human productivity, akin to copy/paste.