[Veserv]

Having seen some of their talks, I do not think they realize the underlying problem and understand its manifestation. They just see that their “fellows” churn out slow software without even understanding how to make things fast due to tradeoffs that society has made on their behalf that left their fellows with no knowledge of performance optimization. They feel a sense of wrongness that things are so different across the aisle, but can not put their finger on it precisely.

The incentives in their industry support performance. They look around confused at the rest of the world with different incentives. And they keep running into people who say: “We can make it fast if it is incentivized” and then do a amateurish job, despite seeming to be professionals, because they lack the institutional knowledge that is commonplace in the games industry. They are amateurs (in this field) due to long-term societal incentives despite having all the other trappings of competence. It is like being Chinese and seeing a regular grown adult being unable to use chopsticks; jarring and bizarre if you lack the context that they do not use chopsticks in their home country.

It also leads to what, from their perspective, are incongruous tradeoffs. They see a 10x speedup that would take a month to implement. The developers say that is a worthy tradeoff, but they do not do it, why? Well, they lack the institutional knowledge. To reinvent all of the knowledge and technologies that would make that 10x speedup take a month would take 5 years assuming they even recognized the opportunity. 5 years for a 10x speedup is not worth it, but 1 month is; it is the researched tech tree that makes the difference and allows worthy tradeoffs to be implemented efficiently. Losing tech and knowledge leads to losing the ability to even make those tradeoffs.

[xyzzy123]

I can think of 50 things which would make the project I'm on faster, better and more secure but the business is not particularly interested in them right now.

The business wants its stated requirements met (plus a short list of key non-functionals) while minimising cost. Performance is not even specified. I don't think there's any "lost knowledge" involved in this particular case, they just don't want to pay me to make it better than it needs to be.

Doing my job well means minimising the time (and by implication the attention and effort) I put in to the software.

This seems quite directly opposed to the artisanal ethos.

[soco]

An artisan was historically a guy working for himself in a small market shop, carving at a chair or sewing leather shoes. The masons tasked to build the castle walls were not "artisans" so there we could see the same focus on efficiency - although a bit of beauty had still its place here and there. My point? Today we don't have those artisan shops, just expectations from regular masons to carve gargoyles at every wall corner.