You could add one more line of crappy code to work around another line of crappy code, when explicitly asked to by your product manager, but that's a pretty bad

You could add one more line of crappy code to work around another line of crappy code, when explicitly asked to by your product manager, but that's a pretty bad way to do it. Even if a lot of people out there are doing it to make a living. It does take creativity to come up with a better way to arrange the code, to balance robustness, performance, and simplicity. Elegance (and even simplicity) is subjective. There are different styles that can work, but you kind of have to have good taste to end up with a good result. It's an art.