His boss is essentially making the same argument as Knuth: Spend your time optimizing what benefits the most from optimization. Or in other words, prioritize, d

His boss is essentially making the same argument as Knuth: Spend your time optimizing what benefits the most from optimization. Or in other words, prioritize, don't optimize blindly. It's a single line phrase, I wouldn't interpret it too literally. Usually you got to be pretty liberal when interpreting those easy to remember lines. It's a lot harder to remember the literally multiple books we could fill when bringing up exceptions.