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It really depends. Working on genome analysis, I once encountered/interrupted (by rebooting after a software update) a student who had been running an analysis for more than a week, because they had not pre-sorted the data. With pre-sorted data, it took a few minutes.

Not everyone works on web sites using well-optimized libraries; some people need to know about N and Nlog(N) vs N^2.

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> some people need to know about N and Nlog(N) vs N^2.

Every programmer should know enough to at least avoid accidentally making things quadratic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

Indeed. As an anecdote, I've come across a self professed frontend UI guru writing quadratic code that worked fine in testing because it only had to display a few tens of items there, but at a complete loss why it was unusable in production.

Or, to recognize when they or someone else has done so and recover.

It's often a case of "N won't be large here" and then later N does sometimes turn out to be large.

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