Two common themes I'm seeing in all these comments, which are especially clear in this one: 1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working

Two common themes I'm seeing in all these comments, which are especially clear in this one: 1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not). 2. In software, nobody can seem to agree on what exactly "quality" means. Software is still such a young field that nobody can seem to agree on anything at all. It reminds me of other fields 100 years ago, where you could just try anything and if it seemed to work that was fine. > Sometimes saying 'things should be done right no matter how long it takes' just means the management is unable to balance technical debt with other objectives. In this case, I would say they'd done such a good job with managing technical debt that they knew they could say "as long as it takes" on a micro-level, and be confident that nothing would blow up on a macro-level. This was a physical system that has annual (or semi-annual) inspections by a third party. Can you say the same about your software system?