Early in my career I worked with an engineer more senior than me who was responsible for performance optimization. He once told me "the fastest thing you can do is nothing at all" which was his way of saying it is better to find unnecessary steps to eliminate rather than making necessary steps execute faster.
Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday . . . .
Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer,
. . . was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. . . . they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.
Best code is no code.