'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 large scale infrastructure systems.

*sidenote* '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 large scale infrastructure systems.

Algorithms and their complexity often occur in critical parts of computer systems, but I find that few engineers have a good understanding of how a O(n!) algorithm compares to a O(n^5^) one.