So much this. But there is a fine line somewhere in there. I have seen and admittedly worked on such projects where time constraints simply do not allow you to

So much this. But there is a fine line somewhere in there. I have seen and admittedly worked on such projects where time constraints simply do not allow you to polish all bits and pieces. That's perfectly reasonable during POC/early development stages and if anything, I encourage it: Writing hundreds of tests when all requirements change three times a day is incredibly counter-productive, slow you down and eventually burn you out. It may happen that crappy is much better than shiny, polished and over complicated if the project itself is not going to scale any further than it already has. And once you get a more complete picture of what the end goals are, then you can go back and gradually start doing things "the right way". But I've also been in another extreme. Take my old job for instance, which despite my at the time cognitive dissonance, I hated to a large degree because of this: relatively early stage with ever-changing requirements, endless dependencies, brutally unstable setup for development where deploying a single pod in minikube was a terrifying prospect because everything was hanging by a thread and rebuilding the cluster took hours. That was made even worse by dozens of forked open source projects that were patched left and right to fit the needs, lagging years behind the original projects, wild dependencies between repos, no real observability over what was going on, the version control was catastrophically packed with auto-generated code(like 80% or more) which was made worse by the fact that everything was git push --force so they don't have to deal with conflicts. Imagine having to explain that this practice should be avoided in nearly all cases. In a nutshell imagine crappy code and infrastructure which pretends to be and is sold as an enterprise grade software. I guess cognitive dissonance was a common theme in the company since everyone was under the impression that everything is perfect. Which couldn't have been further from the truth.