Yes, we are in agreement (except for what I perceive as a derision toward "web devs", which by the way I am not and didn't even mention, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned it). I also left out specific kinds of some very resource constrained domains in general; a terrible omission on my part. I'm sure there are others as well that I didn't call out specifically. Not having experienced every single kind of programming problem type I rather think it would be silly and pretentious of me to try to enumerate them all.
> except for what I perceive as a derision toward "web devs", which by the way I am not and didn't even mention, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned it
I didn't read it as derision. I read it as an indication of a different focus between two areas of development. Microseconds don't matter in most cases. Milliseconds matter more often. Something optimized for microsecond-ish timing will make a tradeoff somewhere else (like code readability, generalness, etc).
often anything over 10 nanosecs is trash
Are you sure you don't mean 10 microseconds?
He probably means 10 microseconds, even if he's talking about HFT. The state of the art for FPGA's seems to be around 700 nanoseconds. [0]
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17256040/how-fast-is-stat...
Yeah, sure, in some domains latency isn't terribly important, but there certainly are a number of domains where it is.