So… how do you deal with this on a personal level? How do you retain any shred of sanity or enjoyment from your work?

I can’t stand self inflicted toil and the stress from constant firefighting which is invariably the result of these short term policies. It makes me want to quit programming altogether and work in something totally unrelated even though I love programming. Just not the way employers want it.

You stand up and talk about it publicly.

The issue is, managers want these things, like a nice code base, but are unwilling to pay for it. Or more correctly you have to pay most of the cost of that Hodge podge of hacks. So while they can off load that cost to you, why would they make an effort to improve the situation?

So what do we do? Working this way drives me crazy, depressed, and unhappy; I don’t want to do it anymore.

I don’t want to be part of the problem either by becoming one such manager so that others will have to pay the cost of my benefit.

What’s left? Opt out, live on shoestring budget for the rest of your life, and hope it works out?

There are thousands of software engineering jobs out there, how many have you tried? A handful? Increase your sample size.

Who listens, though? Look at seminal work like “the mythical man month”… while most people “in the trenches” agree that nine women can’t make a baby in one month, project managers and executives still very much think it’s possible 40 years later.

You can explain it to them, but you can't understand it for them..

And you're the first to be let go. The squeaky wheel that irks the bosses.

Maybe. It is their loss.

One option is to work for a company where an important part of the product they make is code itself, e.g. an SDK. Another is to switch to a programming language that tends to attract quality-minded people, e.g Rust, Go, Haskell.

One is very different from the others.

The one whose designer said “ They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language“

Ha, well I’d agree with you on that, but even so I’ve seen Go mostly adopted by people who are capable and care.

You switch jobs. Of course, there are managers everywhere and of course generally they have similar motivations. However, every once in a while you get one who was a developer-at-heart once (or still is) and does give some amount of shit even when they are looking for their usual goals. If that person doesn't happen to be evil, you stick with that team until things change (maybe the manager moves on). The good thing is that when good managers move, they tend to take the good and trusted ones with them to the new place. Assuming they saw your efforts and value your skills, you can move with them. Alternatively, if they are not the type to do so/you can't move with them, switch again. Either way, side effect is that your pay goes up too due to the switching - just don't do it too frequently.

What you described reflects that corporate structure and might be industry wide. They look at code as only valuable in the monetary return it makes. They might even consider it a cost center. That will always be a less than pleasant place to work in an organization.

So find places and maybe start at industries that consider their code an asset or profit center.

It’s ultimately just a valuation perspective, but understand to a business everything has a market context or business case. It’s can be infuriating, but better to know the system than blindly suffer through it.