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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Hammered by the finance of physics and the weaponisation of optimisation, Moore's Law has hit the wall, bounced off - and reversed direction. We're driving backwards now: all things IT will become slower, harder and more expensive.
That doesn't mean there won't some rare wins - GPUs and other dedicated hardware have a bit more life left in them. But for the mainstay of IT, general purpose computing, last month may be as good as it ever gets.
Going forward, the game changes from "cheaper and faster" to "sleeker and wiser". Software optimisations - despite their Spectre-like risks - will take the lead over the next decades, as Moore's Law fades into a dimly remembered age when the cornucopia of process engineering gave us everything we ever wanted.
From here on in, we're going to have to work for it.
It's well past the time that we move from improving performance by increasing clock speeds and transistor counts; it's been time to move on to increasing performance wherever possible by writing better parallel processing code.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/24/death_notice_for_moores_law/
(Score: 4, Funny) by pkrasimirov on Sunday January 28 2018, @04:06PM (2 children)
> if it was meeting the users' needs, was it really broken?
You are ready to be a manager...
> things that don't need to be fixed aren't really broken.
... in operations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2018, @04:26PM
(Good) managers do add value. If you can make a fix like that in less than the time it takes the non-optimized code to run once, sure - go for it, even take a couple more days to prove it's right and "big win" - on the other hand, when there's a loss-of-revenue fire on another project, spending 3 days to speed up something that nobody is complaining about? That's 3 days of lost revenue for "no good reason."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:02AM
The reason people are employed or contracted is so that they can do things which provide value to the employer. If something genuinely is fine and improving it would provide no value, the employer should not pay for it.
The problem comes when the engineer who is more knowledgeable about the system, sees a problem that the employer does not. This is the common case; often something 'works fine' now but is set up in a way that will cause problems later. But whether this is actually a problem worth fixing depends on both technical and business considerations.......it is a cost/benefit calculation. That is the supposed job of management*, and it is not wrong.
*In a society/environment where people are not acting like little kids who constantly have to be prodded to keep doing work.