I have so many war stories there's not enough space on HN to contain them. I'll just state my overall experience. I write elegant well designed code, but generally speaking you won't find that anywhere especially if you're working in teams. Unless the code is all written by one person who had a chance to design and implement it well solely by themselves with adequate time, it's going to be a mishmash of they just didn't have time and the pressure was on.

I'm of the mindset that if it works, it's good code regardless if it isn't. This I think is the healthiest mindset to have in any team. I will refactor things slowly to clean up issues and of course my own code is well thought out and integrated into the codebase regardless how reckless anyone else is being. Any other way of interacting with a team would be antisocial and not beneficial ultimately. The way I see it is they wouldn't be paying me if there wasn't more work to do. The most important thing is that it works and the customer is happy. Your disappointment with elegance or coverage comes second to that.

The thing that actually annoys me is when, having exceeded my own delivery deadlines and everyone else's if I provide value added like a new feature that puts us far ahead of our competition I get pushback. Management doesn't want to have to maintain it. Even though my code is really solid compared to the rest of the garbage going in there. They just see me as a plumber fixing a leaky pipe and don't want anything further. I get that there's ROI and whatnot but it still bothers me when I show them some next level shit and I'm told to mothball it. Especially when I'm the reason we're usually way ahead of schedule. </rant>