There must be some misunderstanding here, because what you're saying in this post and others just doesn't add up... Specifically you've said that: * it's wron

There must be some misunderstanding here, because what you're saying in this post and others just doesn't add up... Specifically you've said that: * it's wrong to think that knowing about HW, compilers/interpreters, OSes and high-perf architecture will in fact help you "design better (performing?) code in the first place". * changing goals from the sales team has a big impact on the performance optimisations and this happens frequently * in your experience taking a poorly performing prototype and optimising it iteratively was a successful strategy. Poorly performing, as an example, might be 10x too slow. * "It’s not only possibly to refactor for performance after the fact, but dramatically easier to do so, less risky in terms of optimizing for the wrong things, and less prone to re-work." My experience doing C++, Java, JS mostly on embedded and mobile does not match your above statements. I'm not an optimisation expert and in fact this is not even my main work area, but I've seen plenty of catastrophic decisions which hobbled the performance of systems and applications without any hope of reaching a fluid processing workflow besides an effort-intensive rewrite. Furthermore, in those situations the development team was significantly slowed down by the performance problems. In one case an architectural decision was made to use a specific persistency solution in a centralised way for the entire platform and this became a massive bottleneck. Good luck optimising that iteratively, sequentially or any other way. Languages can have a huge impact on performance: in one project an inappropriate language was chosen; non-native languages usually trade memory usage for speed, and this caused problems with the total memory consumption that were never really fixed. I would argue that memory is a typical problem in embedded, along with disk I/O, GPU usage and everything else, not even close to all performance problems can be reduced to CPU usage (or using SQL properly as someone else unhelpfully quipped). How many LoC do your projects typically have and what kind of languages and technologies do you use? I'd be interested to hear if the heavy lifting is done by library code or your own code and if you're able to easily scale horizontally to tackle perf problems. And... how do changing sales goals every two weeks affect performance? Is this some stealth start-up situation? :)