As I had to convince a former colleague, fast but wrong is useless. I can make a very high performance program if correctness is irrelevant. Correctness is the requirement (at least from my professional work), and performance is necessarily secondary. That doesn't remove it as a requirement, but if I'm giving wrong results quickly then planes aren't flying (worst case, they're burning up on the ground and everyone is dead). Performance is obviously important because I've mostly worked on real-time systems. But I can take a correct program and make it fast much more easily than taking a fast but incorrect program and make it correct.

I guess if your work has no consequences correctness can be discarded or rendered a secondary criteria for your programs.