Other programmers can be harsh critics and it's important not to internalize these critics. This isn't a knock on other programmers, but the criticism is often based on their own perfectionism!

Those "other programmers" that are "harsh critics" are often ourselves. How many times have you (any programmer) looked at your own old code and thought, "what they hell was I thinking?"

I can't count the times I've looked at ugly code, fired off `git blame`, and found out it was me.

My experience has often been feeling that something wasn't right and trying to fix it at a low level - variable or function names, length of lines and expressions, organizations in files, things like that. Often I would clean up things superficially but the feeling that something is wrong remains.

Sometimes I come up back after years, having learnt how to organize certain kinds of programs better, and can instantly see that the problem was much deeper than that. I now think that as a rule of thumb, if it is hard to make a piece of code tidy at a superficial level, there is a deeper underlying issue. If I manage to find a good architecture, I try to keep the bad code as minimal as possible instead of investing more time in a dead end.