A technique I learned from Tanenbaum's operating systems book back in the day, that has served me well over the years, is to come up with the theoretical maximu

A technique I learned from Tanenbaum's operating systems book back in the day, that has served me well over the years, is to come up with the theoretical maximum and compare it to a naive implementation. For example right now I have to deal with a data interface provided by a partner company. The theoretical limit of the interface should be 1.625 MB/s. If we were to stupidly copy our numeric streaming data over, we would be within our timing budget, and optimizing this would be optional. However, the implementation of the partner company only reaches 0.1MB/s max. So their "smart" implementation/interface is only 6% efficient, or in other words could be 16 times better. That really helps putting things into perspective, and turns management's bullshit filter on, when the partner company says "you can buy this from us if you want more performance" or "that's just the limit of the hardware".