There are certain applications where big N is common. Web search, for example. But in typical GUI applications, you get a very small amount of input, then you

There are certain applications where big N is common. Web search, for example. But in typical GUI applications, you get a very small amount of input, then you have to be completely finished dealing with that input, before going on to the next input. While I understand Google's need for people who can deal with asymptotic behavior, five of my six interviews there were for Site Reliability Engineering. I would expect an SRE to look for software bugs, sometimes hardware bugs. Consider that with hundreds of thousands of servers, quite likely at least a few of them have defective memory. I had some ideas for an automated way to find all the defective memory in an entire data center, but no they didn't want to discuss that with me, they wanted me to come up with a certain of scalable algorithm.