Anybody else remember the speedup loop.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

tl;dr : programmer inserts a large empty loop in a UI, so that in weeks when he achieves nothing, he removes a single zero from the end of the loop counter to speed up things a bit.

I would expect the compiler to get rid of that loop.

The story is from 1990. Nowadays you would probably have to be a little bit more clever. Maybe toss in a volatile variable?

In pretty sure 1990's compilers would do that.

Reminds me of an old job writing Windows desktop software. Our flagship app was big and bloated, and it had a long load time with a nice splash screen to distract the user.

We later created a light version for a specific use case, and the product owner came prepared with a nice splash screen for this one too. The app was so lightweight that it loaded near instantaneously - so the engineer added a six second delay just to meet the splash screen requirement.

> It looks "pretty" to the UI people.

Buys them time to get stuff done under the hood while you are gazing upon the 'sands of time' (good old Windows hourglass).

It conditions you/me/everyone to be impatient. I opt out of all such transition effects on my phone. I prefer that the screen goes black of freezes until the next screen comes up. This way I don't get distracted by irrelevant junk (spinning wheels, hourglasses, etc.). It is crunching bits. Don't add more junk to it. Let it crunch bits without tricking me.