It depends a lot on your mentality toward writing code. I find matching the long/short-termness of engineering practice to the overall mentality of the organiza

It depends a lot on your mentality toward writing code. I find matching the long/short-termness of engineering practice to the overall mentality of the organization results in the least friction. Concrete example: if you're building a system to last 5-10 years, act like it. Spend time getting the architecture, the variable names, and the module structure correct. But realize not everything must be built to last. I read somewhere else on HN that some groups inside of Google plan a piece of code to handle 10x growth in traffic/storage/resource use before it's thrown out outright and rewritten -- so don't overdesign. Maybe the real lesson is to invest in sufficiently good modularity that it's easy to throw things out without too much pain. Nothing lasts forever.