Yup.

For so many reasons, from a mentor of mine:

Quality Is It's Own Excuse.

If you can do it better, do it better.

Unfortunately we live in a stack ranked world and with incentives like not being deported - people will choose whatever pleases management over any idea of craftsmanship or quality.

A bitter pill, indeed.

>if you can program well enough, then you can write great software quickly

No? Doing things the right, robust way regularly takes more time and effort than doing it the quick and dirty way, which means your lazy coworker gets the management attention and raise instead of you.

For the vast majority of software developers, the correct career choice is just to always be making your manager's life easier, and they rarely care about "doing things the right way", especially when whatever you write will be replaced in five years because someone somewhere is too lazy to understand the current codebase.

The correct career choice is to seek organizations whose values align with yours as much as possible.

Life is too short to spend most of your waking hours surrounded by people whose beliefs go against yours.

[delayed]

> The best reason to do great work as much as you can is intrinsic satisfaction you get from that.

Be careful: it can be dangerous to tie your inner satisfaction with your work, which is not under your full control and also what you need to get paid. You can get burnt out.

Sometimes you have to take a step back and say "It is what it is, we all need money, fuck it and let's move ahead."

I think you’ve made a good point but I’d also note that one can have satisfaction and happiness from small(er) bits of work done well in the context of a larger undesirable/burnout/failure situation. And maybe even such outlook can help stave off burnout during difficulty stretches when paired with a somewhat stoic perspective that one is not entirely responsible for the fate of the larger company/team