The web itself as we know it, was born from a bunch of hacks clobbered together by people who thought that the most important part of development was to "ship c

The web itself as we know it, was born from a bunch of hacks clobbered together by people who thought that the most important part of development was to "ship code". Features like images in browsers, or JavaScript, were designed and implemented in very short amounts of time and then all the cool features were copied by other browsers. With such a foundation, I think we can establish that modern web development indeed is a "hacks on hacks" thing. A lot of people still believe that software development is all about "shipping code". And since many developers work alone, or in small teams - things like architecture, knowledge of web interfaces/APIs, etc. may not be something the developers are familiar with. Then the project becomes popular, which makes it harder to clean stuff up without breaking code depending on your project. New developers hearing about companies embracing stuff like "Break stuff - ship code" isn't really helping them focus on quality either.