I'm glad this came up; I've been thinking about it for a while. When I first started programming professionally and read this quote, I thought it didn't really

I'm glad this came up; I've been thinking about it for a while. When I first started programming professionally and read this quote, I thought it didn't really apply to me. I do a lot of low-traffic webapps and never really felt like I did much trade-off with premature optimization. It certainly sounded strong to say that pre-mature optimization was the root of all evil. Hell, I messed up so many other things that I would have picked any one of them and thought it to be more of a problem. But I respected the person saying it, so I kept it in the back of my mind. Then I had an epiphany. Pre-mature optimization isn't just about performance, and it doesn't even have to be about only programming. In your business, are you focusing on automating something that will only save a miniscule amount of time? Are you building a feature that will rarely ever be used? Sounds like pre-mature optimization to me. And the problem is not that the end-product won't be better; the problem is the opportunity cost. You're trading off a whole host of other things that could be worked on instead. Pre-mature optimization for me comes down to reassessing where I am at every stage of building a project and asking myself: am I focused on the right thing? Because if not, I'm wasting my time.