Important for what? For interviews? In the real world, inefficient software wins because it appears to do more work. When the slow behemoth has to learn a new t

Important for what? For interviews? In the real world, inefficient software wins because it appears to do more work. When the slow behemoth has to learn a new trick, you feel like a hero for taming the beast. You get praise when you reduce the runtime of something from five minutes down to four minutes. You don't get time to rewrite the mess so that it would complete in seconds. That would obviously be impossible because we just spent weeks on the one-minute improvement, right? With a bit algorithmic knowledge, this kind of speedup would be possible, but the knowledge is rare. One could even argue that the algorithm interview trope is harmful because it puts this type of knowledge in the "useless in practice" drawer that will never be opened again.