I've personally, in my 25 years of professional programming, heard it many times to mean "I don't want to consider performance at this stage of development, I w

I've personally, in my 25 years of professional programming, heard it many times to mean "I don't want to consider performance at this stage of development, I want to move ALL optimization to when the code is done." Typically after I've made comments on their design very early in the development process about the code being doomed to be very slow, in a manner that cannot be solved by optimizing small parts of the code later (so will require a rewrite). And I'm not talking about the small wins, that make things 10-50% faster. I'm talking about design mistakes that slow down the code by several orders of magnitude. (Big-O stuff), and that is represented at a point in the design that is so fundamental it's hard to fix without scrapping everything.