About 5 years ago I applied for a job at a company that enabled people in rural Africa to more easily sell the goods they produced (farmers, basket weavers, what-have-you).
If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps something to be said for not optimizing too aggressively for low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency connections. But if you're targetting rural Africa fairly aggressive optimisation seems like a no-brainer, right?
Their homepage loaded this 2M gazillion by gazillion pixel image downscaled to 500 by 1000 pixels with CSS. It got worse from there. I don't recall the exact JS payload size, but it was multi-MB – everything was extremely frontend-heavy, which was double ridiculous because it was mostly a "classic" template-driven backend app from what I could see.
I still applied because I liked the concept but the tech was just horrible. I don't really know why it was like this as I never got to the first interview stage, but it's hard to image it's anything other than western European developers not quite realizing what they're doing in this regard.
The website was never intended for people in rural Africa, it was intended for donors and governments in Western countries, so that the company could get juicy grant money and pay themselves to pretend to empower African farmers.
Believe it or not people outside the US actually buy and sell things too! Africa is a primarily mobile first continent with the fastest growing mobile infrastructure and 100 million new handsets sold a year (and that is predicted to double by 2025).
You better believe that I believe it. However, if they were actually trying to get rural people with bad internet connections as customers, they would make a website that was fast and efficient.
If you mainly target people in the US or EU, there's perhaps something to be said for not optimizing too aggressively for low-end hardware and flaky low-bandwidth high-latency connections. But if you're targetting rural Africa fairly aggressive optimisation seems like a no-brainer, right?
Their homepage loaded this 2M gazillion by gazillion pixel image downscaled to 500 by 1000 pixels with CSS. It got worse from there. I don't recall the exact JS payload size, but it was multi-MB – everything was extremely frontend-heavy, which was double ridiculous because it was mostly a "classic" template-driven backend app from what I could see.
I still applied because I liked the concept but the tech was just horrible. I don't really know why it was like this as I never got to the first interview stage, but it's hard to image it's anything other than western European developers not quite realizing what they're doing in this regard.