Yeah, look at anything Carmack talks about and the entire mindset starts with optimized code. His natural output is optimized.

It's white guys and old guys that can even do it anymore. The rest are Indians who don't know anything, and young ones who have never dealt with resources being the limiting factor. Not even as a coder, I remember having to optimize stupid ass drivers in DOS and pick through what I really needed so I could have enough RAM free to run Doom on a PC it totally shouldn't have run on. Adding more wasn't an option and getting a new PC was cost-prohibitive for a kid.

If I was going to design a learning-track for a good programmer, one of the things I'd make them do is a functional Gameboy game with a list of things they have to make it do. In assembly. Give them an understanding of how everything moves around in a rather easy to build and debug system. Learn to make things work in 8K of RAM.