The rapid pace of improvement in processor speeds over the years - and of hardware performance/cost generally - has mostly been absolutely terrible for software development.
Developers get lazier and sloppier all the time, choosing to just rely on the hardware to pick up the slack from objectively terrible code (often to meet arbitrary deadlines).
The companies they work for don't care because bad developers are cheap, and hardware gets progressively cheaper.
The code eventually becomes so bad, that even faster hardware is required to do even the simplest thing.
The cycle then repeats itself.
The hardware manufacturers obviously love this, as do software companies as they all get to keep releasing 'better' stuff and making more money. The rest of us, however, just wonder why our machines are so slow.
Just imagine what would be possible with our current hardware if this wasn't the case? 🚀
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It's a real issue if you build on super fast hardware and leave testing until the end too... The "works on my machine" gulf is wider now, especially if you are shipping products globally.
I'm not just being a grumpy old programmer here. I've held this opinion for a long time - even giving a presentation on it at University around 1995 🙂
We need more old grumpy programmers. Very nice post!
While I do agree, back in the past in the company I work for now we didn't have micro architecture services.
We could only scale vertically. So I then joined the company and started working on moving the codebase to a vertically based stack.
(No customers could join anymore because of the high load, thus impacting the money they could earn).