If you are trying to optimize for this goal, does it really matter if your software is as effective as it's physically possible?
There's a certain threshold for performance your customers implicitly expect you to reach. If you're within this boundary, is it really worth to spend days coming up with a new inverse square root optimization instead of bringing more value to your customer with new features?
The dichotomy between upper management and ICs in the weeds doing the actual work is mind boggling at times. ICs would understand the spectrum, and desire to create baseline targets across the service for the best experience we could muster. Meanwhile management only cared whether the core funnel met a specific target and viewed all other efforts as a distractions of the bottom line.
This narrow minded thinking directly results in a subpar experience for customers. It's a shame too, because product quality is critical at this organization.
Millennia ago someone built the pyramids.
Centuries ago someone built castles.
Those weren’t built to sell.
Today when homes are built they often use cheaper materials. The builder just needs to get them sold.
Most software strikes me as closer to building a cheap house or strip mall, as opposed to something that needs to last for centuries.
I've spent time optimizing code in the past (mostly python) and its not hard to speed things up a lot. It feels at times though that the ecosystem is working against you.
Tools like electron encourage you to ship many many times more download size than is needed. Python loops speeds are getting better, but they've historically been insanely slow.
I don't think we need to individually obsess over speed, but as an industry we need to give people the tools so that code is performing by default. I think we're moving away from that end.
Also, you will never get a bonus in proportion to the cost savings of an optimization.
How many times in your career has a PM agreed to make room in the backlog to prioritize performance work? It very rarely happens and the reason is that costumers rarely care. It's catnip for developers and I love doing it, but it's rarely something that matters enough