I am reminded about an incident that occurred during my time in college. A teacher had "determined" that a lot of the class was cheating(1) and decided to grade based on program performance. This led to a lot of sizing up of our fellow students. One worried my friend John and me greatly as he talked and acted as if he were God's gift to programming and was practically giddy with excitement at the prospect of kicking his fellow student's butts.

I am sure he would have said "10" to this recruiter without a second thought.

He handed in his assignment at the same time John and I did. He could not help but tell us about his algorithm to do the graphics faster than anybody else. His explanation led us to believe (and be proven right later) that he had a poor understanding of performance and believe that shorter line count always had better performance(2).

(1) the people he thought were cheating, weren't (2) yes, load time was important, but it wouldn't tip the scale - plus writing to the same byte of memory multiple times doesn't beat an array lookup and one write