I've never been told that. I've been told to get something done. How I achieve that has never been an issue. Interesting, performant, or elegant does not mean it has to be slow. That's part of the challenge. Meeting the demands of the business while meeting the demands of a professional.
In my experience, virtually every coding task takes longer to do "the best way" than the quickest or easiest way. Many times it takes much longer. Either you are a savant-like exception to this rule, or your velocity is (significantly) lower than it could be.
Don't get me wrong, I push for doing things the right way whenever I can, but acting like you can have it all with no compromises seems silly.
Depend on whether you are looking at the immediate time scale, (when "the best way" takes longer), or over the longer term, where it is often a lot better to sped the time up front, and have a good solution, rather than a quick hack.
Lucky you, I have been there too. But at my current position, trying to use more modern technologies (Angular.js for example instead of a 15-year old stack without clean separation between front-and backend) to be more efficient is met with stares.
And I venture to say this happens very often in a lot of shops. At least outside of California.
