In IP law, if I see terrible work product that cost my clients $5-$25K in waste, I try to be charitable and remind myself that sometimes there is context that I

In IP law, if I see terrible work product that cost my clients $5-$25K in waste, I try to be charitable and remind myself that sometimes there is context that I am not aware of that may have been the cause. Such context may be client driven immutable deadlines, client-side delays, client-side lack of communication, and so on. In reality there probably was incompetence bordering on malpractice by the prior firm that did the work. But you never know. If $100Ks (and multiple years) have been wasted, I know it is incompetence bordering on malpractice. Especially, if the firms that did the bad work have well known brands. In professions like law, medicine, or professional engineering prioritizing is important and useful but providing shoddy work product or corner cutting should be unacceptable. And often corner cutting is malpractice. In software development I used to push hard to get people to focus on getting from A to B efficiently while using an architecture that supports flexibility rather than over-engineering from the beginning. It seemed to work well. Though I did run into some managers/directors/VPs that would carefully listen to a reasonable proposal and ignore it or in one case do the opposite. I always took that as the sign to move somewhere else. Eventually leading me to go law school.