How It Helps You
In the same way that knowing about design patterns in software help you quickly understand a complex technique, O notation helps you understand and discuss how complex and resource intensive a solution is a function of its inputs. You can use this form of notation to talk about both algorithm runtime as well as memory consumed, and it gives you concrete methods of comparison, even in cases where you don't know the size of the input.
For instance, if you're doing some test runs on small set of data before pushing live to a web server, and you have no way of simulating the high volume of users that it will have in the wild, this comes in very handy. Simple time trials of what you're doing aren't going to cut it because they're going to be on way too small a scale. You're going to have to reason about how your algorithm will behave, and O notation helps you do just that. On a small sample size, O(N^3) may be fine, but in production, it may grind your site to a halt. Better to know that going in.
O notation can also help you avoid writing terrible algorithms or solutions that perform wildly worse than others.
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