Does any of you have the compulsion to micro-optimize every bit of code that you write? How do you deal with it?

I'm not just talking about algorithmic optimizations, but the real nitty gritty stuff. I'm talking about using bit fiddling to avoid if statements where speculative processors might make mispredictions. Anything that might make a program compile to fewer machine instructions or avoid extra stack frame overhead.

This all started a year ago when I took a systems programming course at my university, and started learning C and C++. But I find myself doing this in the wrong places. Who cares if this trivial program that I wrote runs in 1.2 or 0.6 seconds? My future employers won't care if my code is 10% more efficient when it takes four times as long to write.

It's gotten to the point that I can't bring myself to use languages like Python because I don't know how it's implemented under the hood and can't predict how the different ways I could write a function will affect performance. How do I bring myself to trust that the compilers (or interpreters) and the programmers that wrote them will be sufficiently optimal, and just move on? 😩