Oh, for sure. I'm not advocating getting it right on the first try -- that's crazy talk. I'm mostly thinking about programming in the small: methods, classes,

Oh, for sure. I'm not advocating getting it right on the first try -- that's crazy talk. I'm mostly thinking about programming in the small: methods, classes, parameter lists, that sort of thing. Essentially complex problems can't (and shouldn't) be solved up front, but that doesn't imply the internals of that partially-solved problem should be disorganized, or that the API is inconsistent. I find that if I explicitly scope my work as I'm doing it, I can write good code to fuzzy specs, without over-generalizing, relatively quickly. Plus, coming back to it a couple months later (well within the typical employee-raise timeframe), I can fix or modify it much faster. It's a balance, to be sure, but I think it's sometimes possible to work both faster and better.