It depends on how you think about performance. Saying "performance is for suckers" is just as bad as saying "performance is everything, always".

Since you can only count on one hand the number of times performance mattered to you, you probably aren't running into the right sort of problems. Consider things like Amazon, Ticketmaster, Google, and so on. Performance certainly matters there. I'm sure you can come up with several more examples. When I was doing physics, I had to slog through huge datasets. Waiting 30 minutes for a report definitely sucked, so performance mattered there too.

I've worked on some systems that had to serve tens of thousands of people all trying to do something at the same time. Performance certainly mattered there. I've also worked on things where I was lucky if one person used it a day, and performance didn't matter there. Often these things are a matter of scale. Indeed, look for people talking about my Mac::PropertyList module. It's acceptable for small file sizes, but gets exponentially slower with the size of the file. Performance is the big thing that people complain about (anyone want to fix that? :) for that module.

The real answer is "Performance might matter depending on what you are doing". It's one more thing on your to-do list, and you have to prioritize it like everything else. However, as you're coding, you want to have performance in mind so you have less stuff to fix later.

Remember that performance just isn't about fast code either. Over slow networks you want to efficiently use your bandwidth. On multi-user systems, you don't want to suck away all of the CPU cycles or memory (okay, maybe you do, but you shouldn't).

Still, working code usually trumps optimization, but that's just an optimization of non-working code. :)