[feoren]

> Now, it's possible to argue that writing performant software is not important.

The quote I'm arguing against is "I can articulate how all the data I use is laid out in memory." Indeed, writing performant code is not important, most of the time. It is critically important a small amount of the time (actual percentages heavily dependent on the type of software), and yes, in those times, understanding the architectural realities of the hardware is somewhere on the list of things you need to understand to do so, just below a solid understanding of complexity analysis, a wide knowledge of useful data structures, proper design of queries and use of indexes (if relevant), etc. A good software engineer does not say "I always know exactly how all my data is laid out in memory", they say "I know when and how to care about that, and the rest of the times I ignore it." Just like they do with many, many other concerns. Anything else is just premature optimization. The most important problem solving skill by far is knowing what you can safely ignore.