[jiggawatts]

Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.

Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.

I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!

As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!

[ykonstant]

I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens.

To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.

[jiggawatts]

The incentives don't align.

If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement.

Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever.

Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't.

I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails.

Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is.

Nobody does!

That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.

[austhrow743]

If you spend your time hyping performance instead of the things your prospects care about then you will get less sales.