Doesn’t “doing premature optimization” just mean “doing optimization before you ought to be,” and thus the phrase is a tautology if provided without any context

Doesn’t “doing premature optimization” just mean “doing optimization before you ought to be,” and thus the phrase is a tautology if provided without any context or explanation? Obviously any useful advice isn’t just “don’t prematurely optimize,” but rather explains how to recognize premature optimization. I like the advice in this article to write things naturally until you have data that demonstrates that a refactor will improve performance. Obviously experienced engineers will make deliberate optimizations up front without measuring. A great example is making sure your ORM uses a join instead of making N+1 queries: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#eager-loading-associations http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#ea.... Yes, a small app could probably get away with N+1 queries for a long time, but I wouldn’t consider writing this properly to be a premature optimization.