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by ajbeach22
2656 days ago
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>> Senior algorithm nerd on my project is going nuts over algorithmic complexity This is me, but luckily where I work I have people who can keep me in check because we generally do design reviews before anything big is built. However, I have been in situations at previous companies where big(o) was ignored to take short cuts up front, because the "data was small" and suddenly scaling to even just 100 users starts to break things because of poor design decisions when it gets into production. I guess the lesson here is more the importance of design reviews. Also n^2 is HUGE even for small data if there is IO or api calls involved. Any public api you provide, that is n^2 is not a good idea because you never know who may end up using it for what. |
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Right. In my case, the operation was an extra memory comparison. For something already in the cache.
Sure, constraints can change and your assumptions about n<10k may prove unwise, but that's our call to make as engineers. YAGNI. If you know n is never going to grow, then why waste time on it? We're not paid to write pristine code. We're paid to solve problems while hopefully not creating new ones. Pragmatism and all that.