> It is a software engineer’s job to build quality software.
It’s our job to deliver value to the business at a rapid and maintainable way. Rapid changes are often worth more to the business than maintainability, even over a period of many years. In some cases you could put a non software engineer down and let them build something with ChatGPT and it would work perfectly fine for the next 5-10 years because it’s focused on something particular, doesn’t change much and lives in isolation from the greater IT landscape. In other cases all your points are extremely valid.
That being said we also work in an industry where a lot of “best practices” often turn out to be anti-patterns over a period of a decade. OOP is good in theory, and I know why we still teach it in academia, but in practice it very often lead to giant messes of complexity that nobody really knows how works. Not because the theory is wrong, but because people write code on Thursday afternoons after a week of no sleep and a day of terrible meetings.
After a few decades in the industry, what I personally prefer isn’t any particular approach. No, what I prefer is that things are build in isolated services, so that they only handle their particular business related responsibilities. This way, you can always alter things in isolation and focus on improving code that needs it. It also means that some things can be build terrible, and be just fine, because the quality of the tiny service doesn’t really get to “matter” over its life time.
I personally write code that follows most of our industry’s common best practices. Because it’s frankly faster once you get used to it, but I’ve seen really shitty spaghetti code perform its function perfectly and never need alteration in the 5-10 years it needed to live before being replaced.