Comment Re:Check their work or check the summary? (Score 1) 486
I knew a guy with a Masters in CS who loudly proclaimed optimizing was a pointless exercise.
In many cases, it is true. Not being able to optimise however is quite bad. On the other hand, in my experience when I was given code that ran too slow, it almost never was because it wasn't optimised, but because it did something stupid (like some code that downloaded n files and took O (n^3) time; worked fine with n = 10 but when I tried with n = 200 it just broke down). Changing that to O (n) isn't what I would call "optimising".