In my experience, it is a strong reverse correlation, actually.

With few exceptions, I have almost never been paid to work on code that turned out to be something I was proud of. This is on of the reasons I dropped out of pro dev, despite it being easy money.

What sort of work have you been doing since dropping out of dev?

I've been working on a system for making community websites.

You can see it on GitHub for now: https://github.com/gulkily/RocketScience

> In particular, RocketScience has been tested with popular versions of Lynx, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Brave, Safari, and even Google Chrome.

I love this.

How do you earn a living?

I earn my living by looking for things which I believe need to be done, which help the overall state of things to the best of my knowledge, and then doing them without trying to be immediately and directly compensated for them. Some call this "karma yoga".

I recently posted a somewhat detailed comment about my practice, and linked to even more writing about it, which can be seen at this address: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077742

That's very interesting. Thank you for sharing!

Only on HN..

It depends whether you're a true craftsman, a capitalist, or somewhere in between.

I've seen some ugly crap code that made loads of money. Still pig lipstick imho.

Beauty is perspective, no? Change the viewing angle, change how you see the piece, how you experience the art and how it makes you feel changes.

Revenue was probably the wrong word. Is it doing what it was intended to do? Does it do it well? That’s the beauty, not what it looks like in a text file.

(not a craftsman, not a capitalist, closer to a nihilist utilitarian with a pinch of hope)

It is definitely a relativistic situation, and thank you for your generous reply, you made me smile :D

The pleasure was all mine, I appreciated the conversation.

The client probably doesn’t care how clean the code is…all they want is to see it working and they’ll pay a lot of money for it. I’ve found it better to move fast and create code that gets the job done rather than spend more time on making “prettier” code that does the same thing from the client’s perspective.

Its an inverse correlation in my experience.