Some code I wrote in a drunken haze has been running continuously for 7 years with zero downtime - it was only meant to be temporary!

It has zero comments, the code was inefficient, the variable names are things like "theThing" (it's the best I could do at the time) and "database" is just a series of text files carefully read/written to on the disk.

In my first job we did project/information management systems. Initially for civil engineering projects, later more generally for governments and enterprises.

In some cases we had to have contingency plans for the software and data in case the company goes out of business within the coming 15 years.

Next I worked in advertisement, where clients spent similar sums as the above for cross media campaigns lasting maybe 14 days

That was quite the interesting contrast work wise :)

The jerks always say that it will be 'temporary' and we can redo it later. HAH

We never have the money to do it right the first time, instead we always find the money to do it a second time.

This is why at my last job we had a rule that said prototypes could not be shipped as production software. It had to be either completely rewritten, or at least completely code reviewed and the "bad" parts rewritten.

I approach this by writing exploratory prototypes with good modular boundaries, but stub/hacky implementations. Keeping it simple lets me throw modules away as I refactor, until everything's been rewritten and then I ship it.

Sure, and that works great for a personal approach to code. But when your lifecycle from requirements through release needs to be validated, something more scalable is required. Sometimes that scalable thing is "anyone shipping prototype code will be fired."

It seems like no matter the industry, a (good) temporary fix becomes a permanent solution.