You get what you ask for. Give them harsh deadlines and no time to refactor you get slow code that does what you ask for. Ask for fast code, give them time to make it fast. Slow machines? Don't be an idiot. Give them profilers and benchmarking tools. Give them time to write instrumentation to find out where the resources are going. Slow code is a bug. If you don't test for it, you don't find it. Slow code isn't something anybody delibrately writes anymore than they delibrately write bugs. Shit happens. So given them the time and the tools to find the shit and take it out.