It doesn't seem that people actually learn those things in many cases. I encounter programmers fairly regularly who struggle to grasp CPU vs memory vs I/O trade

It doesn't seem that people actually learn those things in many cases. I encounter programmers fairly regularly who struggle to grasp CPU vs memory vs I/O trade-offs and have no mastery of tools for measuring them. This is unfortunate because the tools can often be a cheat code. It's painful to see people fixate on one possible cause without going to fundamentals and making a proper assessment. These people all pass the traditional programming interview filters for algorithms.