With an attitude like that, I think the author would be absolutely justified in not wanting to hire or work with you. This is the sort of attitude you’d expect

With an attitude like that, I think the author would be absolutely justified in not wanting to hire or work with you. This is the sort of attitude you’d expect from a disaffected minimum wage teenager, not from anyone who took pride in their work or cared about the quality of what they delivered. There are certain things that, even if they aren’t explicitly stated as requirements from the outset, should be reasonably assumed. Avoiding quadratic algorithms is one of those. That’s not what “premature optimization” means; optimization is about tweaking something after the fact but choosing an efficient algorithm is a decision you make at the very beginning. > Want me to make it fast/memory efficient? You have to say it. Forgot to mention it in the first iteration? No problem, cut me a ticket and I will see if I can sneak it into my next sprint. It’s probably a lot easier to just not hire people who deliver poor quality work in the first place. Then you don’t have to worry about whether or not they can go back and fix it later.