> spend hours writing code just so their site/product can handle all the traffic. How it that fun?

It's a personal offense to have something that could work at, for instance, 20MB/s, only performing at half the speed. Sometimes management has to step in and and put a stop to that if it's not worth the effort.

Could be worse - seems athletes put many hours in shaving down a couple hundredths of second in races, etc. Or designers in getting that last pixel perfect ...