Read the full post on my blog here:

eisenbergeffect.medium.com/default-isnt...

Last night I timed a product page load taking close to 6 seconds. This was on a desktop computer on a fast connection.

I did a few tests on my mobile phone as well.

Several times, the home page was completely unresponsive.

One of the pages, I counted out loud to 30 before the content was visible.

There's no excuse for a distinguished engineer to be completely unaware of major performance problems that any customer can see and also unreceptive to discussion.

I have a feeling that if their leadership understood they were preventably losing millions of dollars...

And just to be crystal clear:

The issue was not the tech stack or the perf problems.

The issue was the lack of ownership, awareness, and receptiveness to solving big problems, particularly coming from the Distinguished Engineer and the Principal who interviewed me.

Egregious.

I'm interested in building great things and helping others who are also interested in building great things.

I'm not interested in average.
I'm not interested in ok.

Great.

There were lots of red flags, but fortunately at this point in my career, I don't need to settle for mediocrity, deal with status quo crap, or endure toxic, broken culture. I will tell you straight up if I think you are making a mistake (tactfully and politely).

This was my 3rd interview, and prior to this no one had explained what this team was doing, what their stack was, their architecture, etc. The 2nd interviewer was from a different team and didn't know. The 1st interviewer gave me a different description.

(And no, this wasn't about Web Components.)

Eventually, I told them "Let's stop the interview, because unless you are open to me coming in and proposing changes around X, Y, and Z, then I don't think I'm a compatible candidate."

The interviewers "had not heard" of any performance problems, and did not seem open to my architectural criticisms or ideas on how to objectively improve the performance and scalability of their systems (based on my career experience working on similar solutions for multiple companies in the past).

I visited their customer facing e-commerce site on a fast internet connection with a fast machine, and it's a trainwreck (3s+ to load the home page). If the customer can see how slow your crap is, even on a high-end rig, then you have a problem! The evidence of the failure is there for all to see.

Well, I suppose it's no surprise at this point, but this group had picked the worst possible e2e architecture combination (100% perf/customer experience failure rate at every company I've seen it done at.)

And just because someone at a big company has a fancy title, doesn't mean they know what they are doing either. Often, especially if they have been at the company for a while, they are least able to think about the problem in a fresh way and find the best solution.

Sure. Incoming...

Here's the link where you can get my course with this huge discount!

bluespire.com/p/web-compon...

Don't miss it. I won't have a discount like this again soon.

Group rates and PPP pricing available. Just reach out.

I definitely have concerns that this might break various JS frameworks, and potentially a lot of bespoke solutions.

I wasn't aware of this. This seems like a major breaking change, if true.

I’d be on board with that.

I would like to, but there are a bunch of other factors that make it tricky at this particular point in time. I hope to get those worked out but it will take a bit.