You don’t need to learn performance, you can always scale later. My (half-joking) attitude was always, "Performance? That sounds like Intel's job, not mine.

You don’t need to learn performance, you can always scale later. My (half-joking) attitude was always, "Performance? That sounds like Intel's job, not mine. My code magically gets faster if I do nothing at all, so I'll focus on new stuff instead." That didn't scale very well at all, as it turned out.