On the plus side, since it appears that he understands that you don't optimize the thing that takes 2 ms (application code) while there are things taking 200 ms (database roundtrip) or 700 ms (page rendering), he is probably better at optimization than half of the professional engineers I know.
God save me from one more code review where somebody made a for loop over months in the freaking year an obtuse nightmare because they had (mostly wrong!) ideas about how they could shave off a few processor cycles twelve whole times. (Inline functions for extra speedup! Forget standard math operators, lets twittle bits! Business objects are for wimps, we'll stick everything in one String -> String hash table and compose the keys with inlined uncommented StringBuilder monstrosities!)
