I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
It's not as purely unconscious as you seem to think, at least not for real world development tasks.
The thing is, as a general rule, optimization is hard (yes, there are some trivial cases, but they are in the minority). It's also very difficult to determine reliably if any given piece of code really could be more efficient than it already is. Together, this means that once you meet the minimum performance requirements for realistic usability, it's often a better use of your time to work on things that are guaranteed to improve the software than it is to chase that extra few milliseconds of faster load time, especially when the latter is far more likely to introduce new bugs in existing functionality than the former.
Now, where that minimum required level of performance is is not easy to figure out, and varies from project to project, sometimes wildly, and often over time too ( for example, if you're in a saturated market, the minimum level of performance you need is 'roughly as good as your most popular competitors'), but it's always there, whether you like it or not.
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It's not as purely unconscious as you seem to think, at least not for real world development tasks.
The thing is, as a general rule, optimization is hard (yes, there are some trivial cases, but they are in the minority). It's also very difficult to determine reliably if any given piece of code really could be more efficient than it already is. Together, this means that once you meet the minimum performance requirements for realistic usability, it's often a better use of your time to work on things that are guaranteed to improve the software than it is to chase that extra few milliseconds of faster load time, especially when the latter is far more likely to introduce new bugs in existing functionality than the former.
Now, where that minimum required level of performance is is not easy to figure out, and varies from project to project, sometimes wildly, and often over time too ( for example, if you're in a saturated market, the minimum level of performance you need is 'roughly as good as your most popular competitors'), but it's always there, whether you like it or not.