But what about my academic mental exercise. You mean I learned all these tools and techniques for nothing? How will my manager know if I am a top engineer or not if my code is not impenetrable with ridiculous concepts applied irrationally.
Different scale, different problem. Those "top engineers" at Google are dealing with memory that won't even fit in a hard drive (let alone memory), so stuff like this may as well be pico-optimizations.
The logic makes sense for them. The problem is everyone else copying Google without understanding their own data. Any domain where real time performance is important need to put aside the SWE books and pick up a CPU/GPU architecture reference instead.
Half of the money in IT right now is flowing from investors hearing "blahblah AI blahblah" and seeing dollar bills, which in turn makes half of the movement in IT happen in shitty python code. shrugs
