As I advance in my career, I start to like the messiness of real life software engineering more and more. We all like starting from scratch, from a clean slate

As I advance in my career, I start to like the messiness of real life software engineering more and more. We all like starting from scratch, from a clean slate, but that's actually the easy part, it only becomes hard later, when the requirement have changed and you start to notice the consequences of the bad choices you made earlier, and then you try to leave, or restart from scratch. So you want the easy part and leave the hard part to others... But where is the fun in that? I went to programming because I like things like problem solving, and it is not problem solving if there is no problem. Digging into code that no one understands, that is not documented, working around limitations, finding what needs rewriting and what doesn't (with an emphasis on the "doesn't"), managing technical debt and deadlines without overworking yourself, etc... Now this is a challenge, this is interesting, this is the job I signed for even if I didn't realize at first. And don't let anyone tell you that these are not coding skills. These are totally coding skills, where code reading is as important as code writing, where you have to be able to code with any API, in any environment, in any style. Not just the narrow subset of algorithms (which is also important).