What's the first thing that's drilled into you as a professional developer? Don't optimize prematurely! Better hardware just moves the goalpost of where 'prema

What's the first thing that's drilled into you as a professional developer? Don't optimize prematurely! Better hardware just moves the goalpost of where 'prematurely' is. From a business perspective, if it runs fine on modern hardware, why spend money optimizing it? This sort of means that better hardware should lower the price of software development. You should be able to replace devs competent at optimizing with cheaper mediocre devs, or the competent devs should be able spend less time on the same software. I get the impression this hasn't happened but I havn't looked at actual statistics. But also, software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago. (Note: I'm making guesses on why things are as they are, not as I think they should be. I share your frustrations, why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)