I agree to the extent that people fail to realize how they could be missing out opportunities to innovate or corner a market when they leave performance on the table. Quite often, new products become possible when a basic task like rendering HTML goes from taking 10 seconds to 10ms. I think you can paint the problem in broad strokes from either side of the "how important is performance?" argument.
From a "get the bills paid" point-of-view, any good project manager also has to know when to tell an engineer to focus on getting the product shipped instead of chasing that next 5% in throughput/latency reduction/overhead. I've seen my fair share of programmers (including myself) refuse to ship to a project because the pursuit of some "undesirable" latency and not finish more important features.
For tasks like video streaming, Automation software (CI pipelines to robotics), video games, professional tools for content creation (DAWs, video editing, Blender, etc.) performance is the feature, but then your product is helping them get the bills paid faster. Medical apparatus(es?) and guidance software on autonomous vehicles are examples of where latency is a life-or-death situation.
I think everyone would benefit from playing with OpenRTOS, or writing some code that deals with video/audio where there are hard deadlines on latency. But I'm never gonna hold some weekend-project static site generator in Ruby to the same standard as macOS.
Agreed with what you said, but even for Blender, performance is important but the feature are Free software, good modeler, correct, feature-packed, good looking renderer AND performance.
From a "get the bills paid" point-of-view, any good project manager also has to know when to tell an engineer to focus on getting the product shipped instead of chasing that next 5% in throughput/latency reduction/overhead. I've seen my fair share of programmers (including myself) refuse to ship to a project because the pursuit of some "undesirable" latency and not finish more important features.
For tasks like video streaming, Automation software (CI pipelines to robotics), video games, professional tools for content creation (DAWs, video editing, Blender, etc.) performance is the feature, but then your product is helping them get the bills paid faster. Medical apparatus(es?) and guidance software on autonomous vehicles are examples of where latency is a life-or-death situation.
I think everyone would benefit from playing with OpenRTOS, or writing some code that deals with video/audio where there are hard deadlines on latency. But I'm never gonna hold some weekend-project static site generator in Ruby to the same standard as macOS.