> what is valuable depends a lot on context and the point in life of a particular project+team+organization. For sure, and I only target companies or teams tha

> what is valuable depends a lot on context and the point in life of a particular project+team+organization. For sure, and I only target companies or teams that are mature, struggle to move forward because code quality grinds things down to a halt, and that express the desire for improvement there. However, there are very few companies that 1. Even have the awareness to realize this is where they’re at, and 2. Actually mean it. I’ve been passed over many times in favour of someone else who ships code quickly and cheaply by lowering quality. Every place I’ve ever worked at, quality is the least concern in relation to the others. Now for a startup that has limited runway and has to find product market fit for example then it’s totally different. Focus rightly is on shipping stuff at the expense of quality because survival is on the line. In a few years, once this company has made it, they’ll look for someone to clean their codebase up. My broader question though is whether I should keep branding myself as a “code cleaner”. Despite a (minority) of companies advertising positions for that skill, my experience has been that the vast majority simply don’t care. And those that do, don’t actually care all that much. It’s a struggle though because I get no satisfaction from shipping low quality code and eventually end up quitting out of boredom or frustration. I’m now at a point where I’m considering doing something entirely different from programming because I can’t derive any job satisfaction from writing low quality code and the resulting constant firefighting that results from it.