[temphypercube]

The software is delivered 6 months earlier, and it's 2x slower than it needs to be. Then it continues to get slower, because the company making this code has a culture that actively disdains making software quick (and in any case, the programmers working there don't know how.) 5 years down the line, the software is 2000x slower than it needs to be, and millions of users are having a minute or more of their day wasted, every day, waiting for things to load and icons to move that should be happening in milliseconds. Additionally, the quality and velocity of their work is far lower because using slow interfaces feels like wading through mud, leading to errors and frustration. The total human cost over the next 20 years is on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of quality-adjusted person-years. Now, you might say that the right move is to make the code run well once it becomes a problem- but empirically, I don't see this happening!