This is nice example, but you kinda missed the point.
This search algorithm is purposely making the search engine to sleep for maximum amount of time even if the results come faster. This is really done with the user in mind like you said and not the company. They are, "The users are not stupid, they will notice if some of our searches take longer than others"
I dislike wasting cpu cycles for unrelated reasons like "Users are stupid, they wont notice that it runs slow." so lets use this because it's easy to use without considering the effect on the users.
Your question was "why do you waste your customers cpu cycles for really small difference in speed of producing the code?" It was not "why do some programmers assume that users are stupid and won't notice that software runs slow?"
To the latter, I shrug. It's a big world with lots of programmers. Some believe very strange things.
But I've seen very little code which was written slow because of a belief that the users are stupid. I've seen a lot more slow code written because the developers were stupid.
Comments
This is nice example, but you kinda missed the point.
This search algorithm is purposely making the search engine to sleep for maximum amount of time even if the results come faster. This is really done with the user in mind like you said and not the company. They are, "The users are not stupid, they will notice if some of our searches take longer than others"
I dislike wasting cpu cycles for unrelated reasons like "Users are stupid, they wont notice that it runs slow." so lets use this because it's easy to use without considering the effect on the users.
Your question was "why do you waste your customers cpu cycles for really small difference in speed of producing the code?" It was not "why do some programmers assume that users are stupid and won't notice that software runs slow?"
To the latter, I shrug. It's a big world with lots of programmers. Some believe very strange things.
But I've seen very little code which was written slow because of a belief that the users are stupid. I've seen a lot more slow code written because the developers were stupid.