I disagree completely with this. I have been a paid software engineer for 15 years, and have been writing code since I was 8 years old. Numerous projects (I w

I disagree completely with this. I have been a paid software engineer for 15 years, and have been writing code since I was 8 years old. Numerous projects (I would say even the majority) had spots that could be optimized. Don't believe me? Ok, on the video pipeline I have been working on the last few years: When we finally got around to profiling we found that a large chunk of time was spent scanning for H264 start codes... And we immediately saw that if we simply scanned through the buffer the other way, we cut down it's run time dramatically. Or how about the time that the profiling revealed a "hash table" that was, due to a bug, actually a linked list! Finally, I am tired of working on projects that "optimize" the whole time. The code bases are CRAP. Full of "optimizations" that usually are actually slower, and a nightmare to maintain. Do you know what works better: Concentrate on solving the problem at hand and writing high quality simple code, and don't do anything else.