I am working in HPC, and I beg to differ. Yes, compilers should do optimisation whereever possible, but that is only a small percentage of the story. If the programmer doesnt know which algorithms to choose, the compiler is unable to fix that. If the programmer does not understand the underlying architecture at least a bit, the compiler is also likely going to fail fixing that.

Take one of the most basic programming examples, fib. Depending on how your programming language might be implemented, the recursive definition is likely slower then necessary. So at the end of the lesson, you're being taught to make a loop out of the recursion, so save stack space and such. But usually, the lesson ends here. But this is sooooo far away from the best solution. Think 2x2 matrix and the power of n. No compiler will ever transform your naiv recursive fib to that. So no, the compiler is not the ultimate answer. If you dont manage to educate more programmers, we will continue to run slow software.