[stevebot]

Yes it does matter, though its not usually very grand. Think about it this way, most of those algorithms you learned in college took someone in academia years to write. The algorithms I write in my day-job are usually MUCH more simple.

For example, I remember one developer (who know works at Amazon funny enough), who used dual for loops to iterate through data and find values in multiple places in our application. This caused a noticeable UI slow down. I ended up just loading this data in a Hashmap and it became instantaneous.