[zachberger]

I don’t think it’s important to know the absolute numbers but rather the relative values and rough orders of magnitude.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to developers why their network attaches storage has higher latency than their locally attached NVME SSD

[morelisp]

The absolute numbers are also important. I can't tell you how many times I've had someone coming from a front-end world tells me 5ms for some trivial task (e.g. sorting a 1000ish element list) is "fast" just because it happened faster than their reaction time.

[bmitc]

That's reasonable. My comment is a reaction to the unneeded title. Knowing relative speeds of things as well as ways to characterize and debug them is generally important.