Software design is also about relationships

I've had the opportunity to develop behind a "pioneer" at one company - one who developed software as it was needed in an emerging field. I'm grateful to follow behind and have the time to write new code using the old code as a guideline - most of the hard work was already done!

One of the things I’ve personally learned and been touting it ever since, is that it’s ok not to make perfect code in a hurry or when the real target is somewhere else, if the crude method solves the problem for long enough and is capsulated well enough and the intent of the crude solution is documented and it has tests. Documenting the intent is useful for the next programmer to understand, why the solution has been enough for the needs then and to quiet the DailyWtFs for the next guy poking the code.

By crude solution I mean half-hardcoded or not well generalized methods as the other cases are coming in a year or so. This is also a way to limit the scope and to achieve deadlines. What this means though, is that when new needs arise we need to go ba k and make them better later. Kind of managed techincal debt.

(3) he needed to fix the code that was even more broken

While I agree this can be true in general, this is not often the case.

We do mandatory code reviews in our company, and at least a couple of times, I have received a comment which made me go "whoah, this is much better than my idea!", followed by a new version which is 10x shorter and way more reliable.

Being the author of the code in question, I can tell you with full authority that sometimes:

(1) no, I had no thoughts of fixing the code, I did not know it was non-optimal.

(2) no, I had no good reason for not getting around to fixing it. I had no special requirements that would justify my decision.

(3) yes, I just did not think about it. It is like searching for something for a long time and then suddenly finding it in the obvious location -- except this time, I did not find the obvious solution, so I almost ended up committing this huge code monstrosity.

Sadly, the current neoliberal reality that most people are living in is too cruel and mundane, to the point that the majority have run off to the virtual world to replace the real. The rise of the purely "fantasy" genre in all forms of entertainment, whether it be books, movies, or video games, connected with magical, medieval, and mystical themes that have no relation to the current capitalist world, can be explained by this. Connections such as family members and coworkers, which were previously regarded as "real", is now just a formality, as capitalism dismantles it piece by piece. Interactions with family members becomes a luxury when your job is unstable and continuously worrying about sustaining your household; nowadays this even happens for people in the middle-class. Actually, creating families seem so burdensome, that some even started not thinking about it (hence lower birth rates). And when your coworkers become competitors instead of cooperators set by the fears of job security, the idea of being "close" with your coworkers become a formalism solely existing to maintain your job status. In this depressing setting, some ran out to the new land of virtuality which is the Internet, and tried to create new relationships and interactions there. Hey, they even made their own social structures, cultural habits, and even art, which couldn't have been made in the previous fabric of reality before! (Think of the online forums of the past, gaming communities, web comics, fan art, fanfics, etc...) Are the worlds they live in "fake" and the world they were trying to escape from "real"? For them, the real is as fake as the paradoxes modern society entails, and the virtual world more close to them than the real. I've heard the Japanese is experiencing the rest of the world 10 years faster than then rest of us, and seeing the social phenomenons in the country (rise of subcultures and the hikikomori), our realities are probably fated for a similar path.

The real has become virtual, and the virtual has become real. The "full human experience" that you are urging people to seek, which was previously modernism in the Western civilization, is currently undertaking cracks and erosions. The central modern narrative, which was at first managed by the media and the state, are now being dismantled, decentralized, and replaced by other realities, resulting in a more turbulent cultural climate. (One could view this as a reason why the political climate of the US is so strange nowadays)