> If you took a dynamic methods class in school, you know that big-O notation is pretty much meaningless in the real world. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter how an algorithm operates on an arbitrary set of data

I once spent a day or two trying to figure out why our network simulation was grinding to a halt.[1] The research guys, of course, blamed us engineering guys (you're writing slow code!) Turns out that one of them changed a key algorithm so now it was exponential in the number of nodes in the network. Worked fine when he did a quick 5-node sanity check on his machine, but wrecked havoc on the 50-node full-scale simulation.

Yeah, you can get a surprising amount of stuff done by just derping around. Doesn't mean the educational system should encourage that.

[1] This was a few weeks before a major milestone demo, and days were precious.