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1. Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:04 JST Alex Russell

   If you make websites for a living, know that you are *extremely likely* to be wealthier than the people on whose devices your code will run. This matters to *how* that code runs.

   Let's say you're a webdev in the US, building for the US market exclusively. There's huge variability in cost of living across geos, but even so, Indeed shows a an average base salary for a webdev of ~$80K/yr:

   https://www.indeed.com/career/web-developer/salaries

   Median* household* income, meanwhile, is closer to $70K/yr:

   https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:08:58 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     So when you export technology that was barely working in the US to other markets, it's a *disaster*. And the JS bros take no responsibility for the predictable (and predicted) consequences of their actions.

     Instead, they have continued to spread the (always false) narrative that CPUs are getting faster and that people can afford the JS they're sending.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:08:58 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     • Laurie Voss

     Which brings me to the argument that *really* makes me wince; the one @seldo et. al. seem to be falling back into: that everyone knows what they're doing, so it's fine.

     This bears no resemblance to the conversations I've had with teams.

     Managers and TLs are universally shocked and upset to learn their JS-bro-special stack is losing them tons of money that the "legacy" site didn't. Further, they have none of the collateral one would expect if it was explicit (a financial model).

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:08:59 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     ...and that's before we consider the lower price differences of electronics vs. services and other sorts of local goods.

     Phones and laptops are *expensive* in much of the world, which is why Android accounts for 80+% of device shipments and the average selling price, worldwide, continues to hover near $300 (new, unlocked) even as high-end devices accelerate in price. There are just that many more sub-$300 devices being sold for every trade-up of a wealthy user from a $400 to a $1K phone.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:00 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     The digital divide has a colour, and it is being excavated and widened by the actions of a well-paid upper crust that bear none of the consequences of their actions.

     Wealth acts as a blanket, keeping those wrapped in it from feeling the chill as they open the windows and turn down the heating for everyone else.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:00 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     All of the data in this thread is from the US where inequality is a problem, but is not at its worst worldwide:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

     Technology has broken down borders in many ways, which now means that the merely 2.5x wealthier JS bros in the US may make 20-50x more than users in other geographies:

     https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country

     PPP is a thing:

     https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm

     But even with that caveat, $108K/yr US income is still 6-7x the effective median salary in India.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:01 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     HDDs correlate heavily with lower core counts, and generally signal slower (older) cores, all of which have a big impact on desktop performance related to your web apps.

     Browsers are heavily threaded today, and fewer cores means less performance on JS-heavy sites *in particular*.

     Less expensive phones, meanwhile, tend to feature MANY cores, but the also tend to suck. A lot:

     https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#devices-1

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:01 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     Lower income also correlates with increased network latency.

     In the US, this is maps onto persistent income and wealth disparities between white and (specifically) black communities. Digital redlining is now A Thing:

     https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service

     When data is expensive and slow, you use less of it.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:02 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     A 2.5x difference in earnings is a huge difference in life experience. Developers may not realise how different those experiences are because they don't go looking for them, but it's in their data if they cared to investigate.

     *Most* users do not have fast laptops or phones, even in the US.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:02 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     This is, in part, due to differences in replacement rate. If you, as a developer, have a laptop that's more than 3 years old and cost less than $700 new, odds are you're pretty anxious about it. Can't pack many webs on that.

     But as a user? That's just *the average*. Real-world gets slower from there. Edge telemetry shows that something close to half of our users are on HDDs, not SSDs.

     When was the last time *you* booted from spinning rust?

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:03 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     This might not sound like a big gap, but recall that *most* US households are dual-earner:

     https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/

     This means that you *very likely* make 2x or more than *most* of your adult users.

     But then there are kids and the elderly. If they're potential users, they'll skew income data further.

   • Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 17-Feb-2023 18:09:03 JST Alex Russell

     in reply to

     Now, let's say you decided to rebrand in the Lost Decade as "JavaScript developer"; you feel pretty comfortable packing those webs -- what does it do to the equation? A LOT:

     https://www.indeed.com/career/javascript-developer/salaries

     When I go on about how JS cultists have cost companies more for worse outcomes, this is what I'm talking about. A 35% cost premium, which pushes the income of these folks *as individuals* to be ~50% higher than most households, and more than 2.5x the median dual-income earner.