Hard disagree with this.. "Elegant code, best practices, smart solutions, design patterns — these are done for the sake of your fellow software engineers who w

Hard disagree with this.. "Elegant code, best practices, smart solutions, design patterns — these are done for the sake of your fellow software engineers who will work on the codebase after you rather than helping you fulfill the purpose of bringing value" The fact that business is about money is a truism. The other fact is that, good engineers care about that AND know that good engineering - which requires 'some' obsession with good code amongst other things - leads to faster iteration loops, less bugs, better maintenence, less incidents and SLA breaches. Do you know what they all equal? That's right, money. Believe me, crappy, inconsistent over-complex spaghetti code and poor engineering practices can really really hurt a company. As ever it's a balance of course. Every decent engineer understands the trade offs. For my part, I think about the business goals first and foremost and, to achieve those, I make sure my code is as simple, clear, testable etc as can be when realising those goals. It's often a dereliction of duty as an engineer to just get the job done without reasonable consideration of good practices. Building up tech debt? Sure, I do it all the time. But sacrificing what I know to be a good practice just to deliver? No.