She gives her engineers shit for throwing away microseconds , and I ' m just pissed off that my team ' s webapp takes seconds . It drives me crazy working with people who have no sense of scale when it comes to performance and bottlenecks in the webapp . They ' ll complain about the performance of sorting a large list when it ' s making http requests to external services that take 5 seconds to respond . They point their fingers at microseconds when we have literal seconds in obvious places . Let ' s not waste our fucking time with improving how we manipulate this data in memory when we could literally cut down on our mongo queries about tenfold . I ' ll have shit responding in 300 milliseconds and then my boss jumps in the code on release day and adds some stuff that makes a million queries and turns it into literally 10 seconds or more . And I ' ve seen his eyes glaze over and he said these things just take a while . No , no . they really don ' t have to . If you didn ' t make a mongo query for each of these 5 k items , it might actually run quite a bit faster . And apparently I ' m the only person that knows how to profile code . if it wasn ' t for me actually profiling shit , performance improvements would ' ve been based on gut feelings and switching underlying technologies .