Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Benchmark wars and Number Games

What differentiates a seasoned performance engineer from a
developer(however senior he/she ) is that the seasoned performance
engineer doesnt have to rerun several test runs periodically of more or
less same load nature/workloads to identify bottlenecks in code and can
spot issues in design that can cause performance and scalability issues
in long run much more easily with careful/concentrated fewer test runs
saving lot of heat in arguments(saving fuel and energy) and most
importantly much earlier in dev cycles helping everyone.

Sounds nice to have such folks on board! But wait a minute all this is
good only if the Dev folks listen to the voices and in a predominantly
developer dominated organizations it simply doesnt happen due to various
reasons and even the seasoned performance engineer goes through tough
times of re-running tests again and again to spot the same old
things/cries which he/she would have already cried on top of his/her
voice a thousand times over the roof.

Also much more valid is the quality of ideas and tools he/she uses to
arrive at results quickly can often surprise even the most senior dev
folks that they initially try to initimidate/resist such changes.

No offense meant to any developer folks reading this!

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