The standard LaTeX classes (page styles) are really meant for books and such where generous margins are a good thing. See the IEEE journal paper LaTeX template [1] for an example of space-constrained LaTeX typesetting.
Yeah, most people who use LaTeX heavily get around to memorizing the \addtolength credo (or an alternative) fairly quickly. But the "holy shit, MARGINS" test has a very low false-positive rate in my experience. If you see !!!MARGINS!!!, it's probably LaTeX.