'Jeff Dean':http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ , a famous Google engineer, popularized a list of latency 'numbers everyone should know':http://highscalability.com/numbers-everyone-should-know. The list is a great resource for designing infrastructure system.

Algorithms and their complexity occur often in critical parts of computer systems, but I find that a lot of even experienced engineers don't have a good understanding about how a n log n algorithm compares to a n^5 one.

Algorithms and their complexity occur often in critical parts of computer systems, but I find that a lot of even experienced engineers don't have a good understanding about how a O(n!) algorithm compares to a O(n^5^) one.

In the coding contest world competitors think of these tradeoffs all the time. No wonder, there's a set of numbers every algorithm designer should know.