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He said it's "net spend" and that's another way of saying, "It's fine." It's the equivalent of admitting the engine is running hot, but saying, it's not a problem with the engine, it just needs lots of oil." Frankly, I think the developer is embarrassed. There's no reason for it to be as slow as it is, other than he and the other engineers simply don't know what they're doing.

I think Musk is calling it out because he wants to see who wants to fix it and who wants to defend it.

1 comments

I think you misread "Ad spend" as "net spend" in his tweet (I can't locate any using the phrase "net spend"). He mentioned that performance work correlates well with "UAM and Ad spend", which to me reads as "it's worth working more on this problem" and is indicating the willingness you're looking for.

From what I can see, he offered an opinion that the number of client requests (he gives a number of 20) and the number of internal RPCs (he gives 200) is not the primary reason the app is slow. I can't tell you whether he's right or wrong.

Thanks for the correction. You're right, and I can't tell you either, so I shouldn't really argue.

FWIW, if he actually had written "just throw more money at it to make it go faster", I would understand your more negative opinion. :-)

I mean how does he know it's not "thousands of RPC calls" -- he spent six years and never got it to perform, so he doesn't know. "You're wrong!" ? Based on what?

If I worked for six years on something and it still didn't work and someone came in and said it's "x", I would say, "I'm excited to see that data because I really want to fix this." I think I'm more upset at his attitude than anything.

In all honesty, I think what he meant was "I spent six years and failed to fix something that is fixable, and then outside consultants came in a clearly found clear problems in a couple weeks, and now I'm humiliated," but he has too big of an ego for that.

The guy's job was not specifically performance; he didn't fail at anything. Product managers drive roadmaps so even if you know there's been a performance problem for years, you might not get to invest time in fixing it. That's exactly what Eric was advocating if you read the whole thread.