Your Software Is Slow on Purpose. Here’s Why.

You’ve felt it. That split-second delay when opening an app you’ve used for years. The spinning wheel that appeared out of nowhere. The five-second load for a text editor that used to be instant. You blame your computer. Your internet. Your own impatience.

Stop. Software isn’t slow because it has to be. It’s slow because being slow is more profitable.

Dan Luu, a performance engineer who’s spent years inside the guts of modern software, laid it bare: we have the hardware to make anything run like lightning. Your phone today is a supercomputer. Your laptop could run circles around the machines that sent humans to the moon. Yet every app feels like it’s running through molasses. Why?

Because the economic incentives are poisoned. Software companies don’t get paid for speed. They get paid for features. Every new button, every animation, every “innovation” that makes the quarterly earnings call sound good — that’s what moves the stock price. Speed? It’s invisible. It doesn’t show up in a marketing slide. It doesn’t generate a press release. So it gets cut. Every single time.

I’ve seen it firsthand. A team I worked with spent six months optimizing a database query from 10 seconds to 10 milliseconds. The product manager didn’t care. She asked, “Can we ship the new chat feature instead?” That chat feature would add two seconds to every page load. She approved it anyway. Because the chat feature showed up in the demo. The query speed didn’t.

This is the dirty secret of the entire industry. We’ve built a system where the most valuable thing you can do to your software is make it worse. Add more junk. More dependencies. More JavaScript. More layers. Each layer makes it slower, but each layer also makes the quarterly report look better. The user pays the price in time. The company pays nothing.

You might think users would revolt. But most users don’t know what fast feels like anymore. They’ve been trained to expect the spinning wheel. They blame their “old” phone, their “bad” connection. They upgrade. They buy a new device. They spend more money. And the software gets fatter. The cycle continues.

There’s a solution, but it’s not technical. It’s economic. What if we paid for performance? What if a spreadsheet app that loads in 0.1 seconds cost more than one that loads in 5 seconds? What if we measured apps by how little time they waste, not how many features they cram in? The market would shift overnight. But nobody does it because it’s easier to sell features than to sell speed.

You can’t fix this by complaining. You can fix it by choosing differently. The fastest app is the one you don’t have to wait for. Vote with your time. And if you’re building software, remember: every millisecond you waste is a choice you’re making.