This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life, where you have 16 milliseconds to do everything and it pays to be smart, use clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry (he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company producing software for the film industry.
It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the country chasing a real programming job again...
My experience with games software is that it typically has much longer loading times than other software.
I think this is justified though because what matters in a game is the perceived performance while the game is actually in operation.
If when I load a game it spends an extra 10 seconds optimising quadtrees & shaders etc to give me faster game performance and enable 16 millisecond latencies then it is overall worth doing, since trying to load stuff off the disk while I am actually playing would harm the experience.
I imagine photoshop developers do something similar.
It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the country chasing a real programming job again...