[bcrosby95]

I've heard that performance is a feature but I feel like that understates the effort involved in seeking performance for a piece of software.

If you want to call it a feature, its closer to N features: 1 for each feature you have. If you have 10 features, and add performance, the effort involved isn't like having 11 features. It's like having 20 features. The effect is multiplicative.

This is because performance is a cross cutting concern. Many times cross cutting concerns are easy to inject/share effort with. But not with performance. You can't just add an @OptimizeThis annotation to speed up your code. Performance tuning tends to be very specific to each chunk of code.

[gameswithgo]

If everyone on the team makes it a habit of worrying about it, everyone gets better at it. It becomes a part of the review process - "this looks correct, but is there a faster way?" or "this looks very fast, but we could make it a LOT simpler and only a little slower, maybe we should."