[deterministic]

I always laugh when some inexperienced developer, or an academic who has never built software for real customers, claims that “performance doesn’t matter.”

I spend a significant amount of time improving performance for our paying customers because performance absolutely matters to them. They might use a single simple feature hundreds of times during a normal workday. When we make that experience even 10% faster or smoother, they notice immediately and are genuinely delighted by it. That creates an enormous amount of goodwill.

And sometimes we can go even further and completely automate tedious workflows they hate doing manually. That’s even more valuable.

Developers with experience from the games industry understand this instinctively. Even when the software has nothing to do with games, they tend to have a deep appreciation for responsiveness, efficiency, and user experience. That’s why I’m always excited to hire people with that background.

[hrpulsar]

Strongly agree.

When we worked on a SaaS HR platform, simplicity of use and the speed of getting an actual result from a workflow were some of the biggest contract renewal factors.

Even relatively small improvements strongly changed how customers perceived the product.

A lot of developers still underestimate how much “fast and simple” translates into trust, reliability, and user experience.