[chimtim]

The demand is quite low. I think if you want a good low-level code implementation, you can easily find one on github. For example, you can easily find a good compression algorithm for your CPU budget or other application needs on github. So you can get away with mostly writing high level code and using these external libraries. Second, the demand for writing really optimized code is not as high as 10-20 years ago. Now, writing reasonably fast, readable code is OK and no one expects you to run gcc -S and count cycles unless you are working in some high frequency trading firm.