This is the lesson I really learned the hard way and way too late. If you are passionate about software craftsmanship, making the code not just fast and correct, but beautiful, don't write software for someone else's company. When writing code for a company, you're a tradesman, not a craftsman. Schedule and customer acceptance is all you're going to be measured by. No customer cares if their water pipes are beautiful and the way they run is elegant and gives your basement a nice '20s art deco look. They just care whether they're leaking or not and can you do it by Thursday.

If you like to spend days getting the architecture just right, moving code around from one file to another because it just makes more sense there, running it through lint on the strictest settings and getting no errors, alphabetizing your #includes and lining up all your variable names, sanding and polishing away until that code is a beautiful diamond, then for your own sanity don't write software for a living!