Software is an inverted pyramid, most programmers don't need to know the low-level bits. However if you don't have at least someone to hold up the lower layers

Software is an inverted pyramid, most programmers don't need to know the low-level bits. However if you don't have at least someone to hold up the lower layers of the pyramid then everything falls over. Performance and memory is one of those weird things where it doesn't matter until it does, and then it really matters. I can't count the number of projects I've been on where there wasn't a way to "scale" out, we had fixed resources and the only path forward was deep low level optimizations.