I try to follow this mantra from Kent Beck: "Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast."

I find that most of the development environments that I have worked in, the focus usually ends up being on getting new features completed in order to help facilitate the sales department to make sales. It's a never-ending cycle that will gradually accumulate technical debt such that pushing new features out the door will eventually come to a halt.

Yes, I agree that code can never truly be perfect. However, as developers we should always strive to make our code better.