My go to rule in engineering management is "we'll fix it later". I helps with my own anxiety about not having the best possible technical implementation and it

My go to rule in engineering management is "we'll fix it later". I helps with my own anxiety about not having the best possible technical implementation and it helps ensure my teams don't feel totally stressed out with having everything perfect. If it works, we ship it. If it breaks, we iterate on it and fix it. The key here is to make time for things to be fixed. That is my second rule in engineering management. Give yourself and your coworkers some grace. Most of us are not writing software that has to be 100% perfect otherwise someone dies. So we're not lying to ourselves here. Most of the time we don't have to fix it later because it is good enough to get the job done. This mantra also helps when working with others that do things differently than you would have done. Does their implementation work? Yes. If it breaks or isn't 100% the best solution right now, we'll fix it later. Also, saying "bad code" is highly subjective. I wouldn't call any code that is in production inherently bad. It just needs to be fixed later. :)