Software engineers hate code

The issue is that in many companies there is constant pressure from management to "innovate" by building new features or new products, even if they are of no particular utility. New stuff will bring new customers (or new subscriptions from old customers) and that will either make you personally rich, or at least look good on your CV so you can leverage the experience into the next job where you can get rich. And if the project fails, it still leaves you looking more valuable to the top brass than the people who quietly kept the systems running, because you took risks and had big ideas and showed a growth mindset.

I didn't really notice this at the start of my career, but once you see the pattern it makes so many jobs incredibly depressing. People just keep building more and more crap to advance their careers and enrich the shareholders, even when very little of it is actually useful. It's even more depressing in B2C where it becomes apparent that a large part of the money comes from exploiting individuals who simply get a buzz from buying new stuff, no matter what that stuff does or how good it is.

Personally, I am much more happy to work on an established system that already has real customers that value what it does. The phase of throwing huge amounts of crap at the wall to see what sticks is over, so what remains is an actually-useful piece of software that's full of bugs and superfluous functionality that the "innovators" (comprised of both good and bad developers) left behind. I think it's worth it to have good engineers dedicated to this role of taking the mess and refining it into the best version of the thing that customers actually want. Leaving that task to the bad developers will just result in the system eventually collapsing, which might not matter to the entrepreneurial types who only care about growth, but it does matter to the customers who were getting value from it.

I love the Eastern European approach; blunt and to the point. The French are also good for this. We anglos are so sensitive, and so afraid of offending, that you end up with a silly inefficient dance. “Have you considered? Perhaps if we tried this approach…”. No! Give me “this won’t work, do it this way” every time!

Once you're a senior dev, you start to look at the project holistically, adding your input to the design in order to ensure that the project serves its objectives. The code is still important, sure, but the success of the project is more important (and that can sometimes involve some short-term ugly changes).

If there's a business need for a hole in the side of the house covered with plastic that will probably be there for the next year, it's expected that you've all had many meetings discussing this modification and its necessity. By the time the code changes come, you've either long agreed with the reasoning, or have agreed to hold your tongue, or have started shopping out your resume.

Regardless, by the point this code is written, you'll already be expecting it and won't be blaming the dev who wrote it.