Don't become a project manager. If anything become a product manager. It is a desperate need to have product managers that have some inkling of what it's like

Don't become a project manager. If anything become a product manager. It is a desperate need to have product managers that have some inkling of what it's like to develop software. In some places this might be a semantic difference, but project managers seem more about people and scheduling than understanding a software product. Your background will be more useful a bit closer to the code. If you are interested in continuing to build software: everybody sucks. Difference is: some realize it and some don't. You are a rare person that made the jump over the chasm. We all take shortcuts. We all compromise. And none of us knows enough to have the perfect solution pouring from our fingertips at any given time. Guess what? Those things you've identified? Yeah. Bad. But even after you fix all of those, there are hundreds, maybe thousands more waiting for you to identify them and fix them. And when you fix enough of them you'll realize that striving to code perfectly is, itself, a code smell. And you'll start doing some things 'wrong' on purpose. Why? Because it's all a trade off. And you're not coding to code, you're coding to solve a problem. And sometimes that problem doesn't need perfect code to be solved. All of that 'bad' code you've created? It solved a problem. It's probably not as bad as you think, given the parameters of the problems you were solving. By all means, fix the problems you see. Try to do better. Learn from others. Rinse and repeat. You have to enjoy that journey because it should last a lifetime. And if you don't, there's always product management.