Comment by critium

My posit was that 80% of the software an engineer will write will not require optimization and based on the responses i've been getting I should have used "rule of thumb" vs mantra. My intention was to warn the ones that read this and say, oh i gotta do all of this for every piece of software that I write, which will undoubtedly lead to overly complex code when a simple solution would have worked just as well.

  "Know your performance goals going in and code accordingly."

I this is key sentence here and its worth repeating. Know your performance goals before your fingers touch the keyboard.