This morning while I was still in bed, I read this article by a former Microsoft employee, recapping a story from their work on the Visual Basic compiler.
I enjoyed reading the programming anecdote, but the critical gist was that it’s not always necessary to optimize for raw performance all the time. When I was a junior developer, I encountered several situations that were merely focused on raw performance (“We always do it this way because it’s fast”) without taking into account what the user actually needs and does. I think that “New Grad vs. Senior Dev” illustrates this pretty well.