There needs to be a sense of ownership and pride. Even my side projects are written then rewritten over and over again until I’m personally satisfied with my approach and the quality of the code. If I use a hack to get something done on code no one but myself will ever see, I still leave a shame comment (//mqudsi: this is an ugly hack because I was too lazy to clean up access to this global variable. Fix me.)
We aren’t dealing with anything new in terms of work ethics and quality control in software development. I maintain my code quality the same way a carpenter 2,000 years ago would have cared about how well the insides of a finished product are designed, whether it exceeds its required specifications, what other carpenters would think of their work, how they would feel if a future apprentice or master saw what they created that day, and so on and so forth.
Additionally, I place a premium on “skills learned or perfected” over “bugs closed or features implemented.” If xx is better implemented via an approach I haven’t used before - well, here’s my chance to learn how to do that. Sure, it’ll delay the process. But that’s where technical debt comes from. I may only end up writing ten lines of code that took me 17 hours to figure out and understand, but if those are the right ten lines of code then whatever else I could have or would have written or accomplished in those 17 hours doesn’t matter.
When the goal is “closing JIRA issues or GitHub PRs” and the only metric is how many bugs you closed that day, code quality will suffer. But instill that sense of pride, take ownership in your work and create an environment where others are encouraged to do the same, and it’s a different matter.