> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience
That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves.
You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.
Just install any old file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler or Gator Cache and a Wordpress install becomes a static site for every single request until content is updated. Takes all of 5 minutes, win win for all involved.
A bit off topic since the thread here was related to performance, but caching in WP doesn't solve the other big problem of security.
A caching layer can indeed make WP act much like a static site, though the cache still lives on your server rather than a global CDN layer. Behind that cache, though, you still have the live WP server with all the potential security risks that come with it.
Caching is a nice perf gain, but if you want a static site anyway there are still major gains to be made with a proper static site distributed globally.
If gross sales is literally the only important metric in software engineering we've already failed.
Though on the cost side security breaches can be expensive, as can the endless task of updates and maintenance required for a live server. Live servers can also be a scaling bottleneck, often that isn't too important but it would be for anything that is highly seasonal or has large spikes of use during Black Friday events or similar.
Context matters, you've boiled it down way too far. Gross sales is a primary metric for the business, that isn't necessarily and shouldn't be a primary goal for the engineers building the software.
> For the engineer writing code, I would absolutely expect they have different priorities and metrics than the business or accounting department.
And yet the business has that expectation.
> I personally wouldn't even consider hiring a dev who makes clear that the only metric they care about is gross sales.
Yes, you would, as you are instructed to. The only difference is that you have deluded yourself that there are interim metrics that actually matter, when they are all lossy abstractions of revenue or profit.
> Yes, you would, as you are instructed to. The only difference is that you have deluded yourself that there are interim metrics that actually matter, when they are all lossy abstractions of revenue or profit.
It sounds like we have lived very different lives. I have hired engineers and never once asked, or cared, how highly they value gross sales. I have also never been instructed to do so.
In engineering orgs I have hired for, the metrics prioritized are always related to estimating and delivering features on time, code quality (often through test coverage or bug count), etc. When hiring, the focus is on skills and experience that would likely lead to those outcomes.
Let's try a different industry. A politician will care most about how quickly and cost effectively a new bridge can be built. Do you think those should also be the only factors that matter to those actually building the bridge?
> In engineering orgs I have hired for, the metrics prioritized are always related to estimating and delivering features on time, code quality (often through test coverage or bug count), etc. When hiring, the focus is on skills and experience that would likely lead to those outcomes
Those are lossy abstractions for profit in the private sector. Again, you're missing the forest for the trees.
What's really happening here is that you are unable to see your commercial role, and instead are focused on the vanity metrics you think are important.
Every one of those metrics would be sacrificed in an instant by the business if it increased sales. They're only even marginally important as long as they align with that goal.
> A politician will care most about how quickly and cost effectively a new bridge can be built. Do you think those should also be the only factors that matter to those actually building the bridge?
The public sector is a different beast, but again your understanding is completely divorced from reality.
Public infrastructure projects in democracies are built to secure votes. That's the only criteria outside of the engineering requirements which are written in law in blood.
>That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway).
Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page.
>You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them
The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake.
One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?
Sure - and in principle 'someone' should go and setup this pipeline. I can guarantee you that if this process is reasonably transparent to the marketing folks, they will not care.
Or do you expect the marketing folks to go and setup this static page caching?
WP has plugins to publish as a static site already. They just don't seem to be very commonly used. You get the 'ease' of the WP admin UI and the 'safety/speed' of a static site.
We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.
That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves.
You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.