Maybe THAT is the metric to focus on. The value of the code versus the quality ? I honestly don't know the answer ?
But I know how much of my "time and energy (as you get older you released the limiting step is your cognitive-energy not so much your actual wallclock-time) " I spent on "trying" todo code correctly which many times it means, the code doesn't get done and I end up frustrated by not shipping anything.
Working for a boss, the above used to upset me a bit. Now working for myself this REALLY upsets me and my 'income' :)
In these cases, I would DEF liked to have "Fabrice" getting shit-done-coding ability ? Again just my humble opinion :)
Maybe coding is like a marriage... a) "You can be right or you can be happy :)"
Squinting hard enough: b) "You can do things correctly or you can ship code in time that makes a difference ?"
I guess the "better" you are the closer the extremes are from "b". i.e IF you are the theoretical-best-coder-that-ever-lived there is should be no "distance/friction" between "coding correctly AND shipping on time code that has an impact" ??
Writing code for me made me indispensable, then it made me a bottleneck with a stream of uncomfortable distractions in the form of people queuing up for me to answer questions or fix bugs or implement features. It was exhausting, but I was happy enough. That is, until there was a cooler project I wasn’t allowed to transfer to because I was indispensable.
Figure out how to write code so other people can read it. Figure out how to write code so other people can modify it. It looks a bit like clean code, but sometimes isn’t. Occasionally it can be quite different.