Almost all software I use these days is absurdly slower than it should be and probably a massive drain on collective productivity
Productivity, energy usage, e-waste in landfill as people are forced to upgrade in order to do simple tasks with the current software... The world is paying a high price for programmer laziness.
Is it programmer laziness, or insane demand for software due to many factors, mostly profit?
There's insane demand for games, and those programmers are able to optimise their code, insane demand for trading software and those programmers are able to optimise their code. But webdevs just don't care. I look at pages now that do nothing more in functionality than the same app would have done 20 years ago, yet they are slower now, and I have literally 1000x more CPU power. It's insane.
Optimized games have a well known impact on sales. I'd assume the same with trading software. Putting out a blanket statement that web devs are lazy is just silly. Developers rarely have much say in how much time they can dedicate to features and the app as a whole, that usually boils down to PMs and management. If the org as a whole doesn't value performance or doesn't think it matters, then that will get reflected in the product regardless of what the developers actually want.
Productivity, energy usage, e-waste in landfill as people are forced to upgrade in order to do simple tasks with the current software... The world is paying a high price for programmer laziness.