From my inexperience (3 years at one company, 1 year at another), the sad truth appears to be that the developers would care just enough to hide the problem. F

From my inexperience (3 years at one company, 1 year at another), the sad truth appears to be that the developers would care just enough to hide the problem. For example at my last job, I was pair programming with the "most valuable" C++ programmer. We were debugging one of his monolithic heightmap classes. Some top-level method was calling some deeper method that was doing a lot of different complicated things. After examining the top level method in the debugger, and looking at the results after calling the deeper method, he wrote some code to "patch over" the problem. I.e. The deeper method was causing the results to be bad in some way, and his solution was to add code to overwrite the bad results with the expected ones. Then we ran the program and it worked. To my surprise, he stopped there and committed the code. As he was writing the commit message, I asked "Hmm, aren't you interested in why the internals don't seem to be working properly?" He shrugged and said "No." I hear their game engine has suffered rather severe performance problems and general bugginess. It also looks visually to be 2004-era.