>It's my opinion that most companies are 90% operating failures / doing stuff that doesn't make sense, while there is 10% that does make sense and subsidizes all the failure. Some people call this taking risks, and indeed the worst places to work take the fewest risks, but I don't think the two are related.

so, is the metaphor of drawer useless in software? Is there no point taking pride in the craft because it's all going to fail anyway?

I don't mean this rhetorically. I just genuinely wonder what and how different people's mindsets are with respect to work in the field. I work in games so success is rarely guaranteed, and shorcuts often taken. There's very few times I can say that better code would have saved a game financially.