I think iterating quickly is important for startups. However, long term focus should be on staying ahead/keeping pace with the competition.

Agreed.

One your last point, I don't think that will ever happen. There is a lot to benefit from your role being ambiguous.

I agree with this portion 100%

The correct way to express a dictionary in XML is something like this:

<root> <item> <key>Name</key> <value>John</value> </item> <item> <key>City</key> <value>London</value> </item> </root>

In the past I used to create scripts that exported xml from relational data but didn't really understand the right way to build and structure them.

In major US west coast cities, definitely yes. 100k is not enough.

I used to use awk all the time whenever I wanted to evaluate specific portions of a columnar file (With a short one liner). Python comes close but, awk is much faster. In conjunction with SED, I think that is a little much and imo exceeds what I was doing. If I need to do any replacing or 'cleaning', I would then use something like Python or SQL.

"Took 15 secs while my colleague was still stuck debugging his own weird for loops."

This is a fair response.

I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha.

I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.

I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up.

I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D

I remember using window functions to create complex data outputs for data transformation pipelines. I didn't even know what they were but postgres just started supporting them and it looked like the right solution at the time.

I don't find a whole of use for them now but, I believe simply being aware they exist and an idea of what they do is easy enough to research and apply to any project you are working on. This is from a analyst and dev perspective.

Correct. I thought it was in the real estate business.

Microsoft is no stranger to that discussion. Echoing back to the early days of internet browsers and PC bundling.