On the other hand I find that the problems where performance is relevant are the problems that are technically interesting and rewarding to solve. It's also no

On the other hand I find that the problems where performance is relevant are the problems that are technically interesting and rewarding to solve. It's also not necessarily about scale, as in number of users that one needs to serve. There are lots and lots of problems where performance is very relevant, from startups that can't afford to scale horizontally, to projects in an industrial setting that have to be rock solid, to participating in real-time bidding on RTB platforms, to games in which frames being dropped are a disaster, to the platforms on top of which we build stuff. Quite the contrary, I believe that too many software developers are focusing on building front-ends to a database, but this isn't necessarily because these problems are solving real needs.