I think in order to teach performance engineering, the person being taught has to actually care about performance. I don’t think a lot of software folks really deeply care about performance too much.
Significantly increasing performance is one of the most rewarding tasks in software development, comparable only to deleting unused code. At least for me.
However, for most business applications, it doesn’t bring much value. Modern hardware allows a lot of inneficiencies, and having some step few seconds faster or slower won’t matter much. In the last decade I spent maybe a day per year improving performance.
However, when I worked on some mini games recently performance was important since day 1. And I got a lot of joy from that process, programming was fun again!
Caring about whole-system performance is another step beyond that, because you mainly care about second-order effects and not going full blast using all the resources.
Even the performance people can argue with me on here when I give them correct advice like that you might not want to try and use all CPU and memory just because they're there.
(For instance because your process is lower priority and so is only scheduled on E-cores and so the # CPUs number you see doesn't actually apply to you.)
However, for most business applications, it doesn’t bring much value. Modern hardware allows a lot of inneficiencies, and having some step few seconds faster or slower won’t matter much. In the last decade I spent maybe a day per year improving performance.
However, when I worked on some mini games recently performance was important since day 1. And I got a lot of joy from that process, programming was fun again!