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I'm fond of saying that one of the big differences between theory and practice in CS is that in practice, we don't immediately drop the coefficients. Instead we study the problem to learn what the coefficients are and use that knowledge to guide our approach. For instance, there are times a linear search will just flat out beat a binary search due to cache effects.

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But if you care about the coefficients the first time you write the code, you are prematurely optimizing. The theory here is wiser than it intended to be :).

First draft: don't be stupid with asymptotics as PP says.

*only if there is actual problem in prod or whatever: bust out the concrete measurements.

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