If you spend an excessive amount of time on a problem, sure, you lose that time immediately. The far more likely case is that your code quality is too low, whi

If you spend an excessive amount of time on a problem, sure, you lose that time immediately. The far more likely case is that your code quality is too low, which means you're sacrificing untold amounts of productivity later on. Well-written, self-explanatory code is a piece of cake for later developers to modify. Code repetition and counterintuitive naming has a good chance of wasting other people's time for no reason (if it doesn't bite you personally). In larger enterprises and startups alike, I suspect more productivity is lost revisiting badly-documented hacks than doing gold-plated "elegant" work for the first time.