[jimbokun]

Rule of thumb:

Code is "compute heavy" (could equally be memory heavy or IOPs heavy) if it's deployed into many servers or "the cloud" and many instances of it are running serving a lot of requests to a lot of users.

Then the finance people start to notice how much you are paying for those servers and suddenly serving the same number of users with less hardware becomes very significant for the company's bottom line.

The other big one is reducing notable latency for users of your software.