Soft Orders of Magnitude
There is more discernible levels of lagging between &quot;instantly&quot; and &quot;1-2s&quot;, and more levels above &quot;a weekend&quot;.<p>For example, for about 3 years I worked on a project where I had to send the code I wrote to an external entity to get it compiled and signed before I could run it on my device. It took one week at the minimum. I had to completely change the approach to my personal coding process as well as development process in general. It was so powerful that even to this day I am developing for days without compiling code and people are very surprised it usually runs on the first try -- if you can write in ANSI C for a week and have it running on the first try, doing the same in Java is a piece of cake.<p>Trust me, waiting for a week for your code to run is very different from waiting for a weekend, where you can leave your computer on Friday and plan to conduct your tests on Monday.<p>Other even larger orders of delay concern ability to change things in the environment. For example annoying things like broken process, broken automation, etc. In one company you could be able to fix things on your own, sometimes in minutes. In other companies you could face multi-month wait to get even slightest changes. If you have to wait for a quarter to get a new Jira ticket field you are not very likely to do it or care for the process in general.<p>Then you have the world of shorter delays.<p>Things that take a millisecond will usually already require you to take this into account when you work with it. Can I do this in a loop? Can I recalculate this whenever I need or do I need to cache the value? Etc. Whatever the solution, it costs you a bit of your focus and as we all know, focus is the main resource of software developer.<p>Then you go to 20-50 milliseconds and this is where users notice delays. It is not as snappy as it was even if they can&#x27;t exactly specify what changed.<p>By the time you get to 200ms, the users will complain the application is slow and irritating, especially if they spend a lot of time in it clicking on things.