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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> runtime complexity has literally never once come up in my life

There are definitely different types of programming jobs, but for some contrast: I have never had a job where runtime complexity did not come up as a significant factor somewhat frequently.

It really comes down to what you’re doing, but at a certain scale or size of problem you really do need to know about algorithms, data structures, and runtime complexity to avoid having your runtime explode, server costs become untenable, opening the door to extremely long running requests and other problems.

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In my experience the biggest bottlenecks are in the network. Most optimizations are also very very low hanging fruit because the original code was written by a moron

Also, using scripting languages and misusing browser engines unironically yet expecting performance...

Using electron isn't a performance decision, it's a labor one. It's easier to write a website once and then just export to electron than it is to rewrite your application in QT or XAML or another native desktop framework and have to hire C++ or C# developers

If Browsers can do Figma and VS code, they're already a far capable and approachable platform at least for most desktop applications than Qt especially for anything that has some data entry such as ERPs etc. And it's free. Qt is not.

> There are definitely different types of programming jobs

That's what most people on HN forget. The programming world is huge. Even more so, if you include all the stuff we wouldn't traditionally include, such as people using code to optimise business or production processes.

It's always best to assume that you don't know what "most software jobs" are like, because you're very unlikely to have seen more than a tiny slice of it.

I'd estimate that 98% of companies are just receive-deserilze-validate-transform-store a.k a CRUD shops though some might have borken it down into distributed chunks (Micro Services) without any of the distributed tooling or mindset and awareness in place.

So... That's less likely where you'll need your dynamic programming or palindromes in constant time or space.

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