Those margins also mean you have to pick your battles. Most software is not as performance sensitive as video games or HFT.

I take an efficient market hypothesis on this. Obviously devs can make stuff faster, and they do where it matters, as can be seen in games and HFT. In other software it’s a discussion with product of trade offs.

In most of the scenarios I’ve mentioned, everyone but the devs disagreed about it being good enough. Too many people think the flame graph is the pinnacle of performance analysis and it’s just table stakes.