I would love to see a future where folks write code without thinking about how "scalable" or "performant" their code is and instead focus on how easy it would be to change the behaviour of existing code.
At one point experience and intelligence converge and things get better.
You may not be running your site on a pentium 2 but shitty performance adds up quickly and computing power is not infinite.
You have to be skilled at office politics or make sacrifices to keep code quality high. Usually not worth it. You get yelled at less if you externalize all the costs to future suckers, instead of trying to reduce those costs upfront.
I literally just had this exact meeting yesterday.
So much basic maintenance had been skipped that a suite of apps was costing too much money to migrate to a new platform. Instead of asking for more budget for that app, the dev manager suggested using the money from an upcoming project for an unrelated app to finish off this one!
It's a literal Ponzi scheme, using funds from newcomers to pay off the technical debts of previous projects.
Which of course never ends. Now the next project will go over budget, leading to rushed work, corner cutting, and drawing down on the project after that, which in turn will be a mess, etc...
It's fascinating to watch this kind of stuff unfold as an outsider.
Just try really hard to not work for shortsighted people or bad companies. There are tons of great workplaces out there that will treat you like a king and pay you very well. Keep looking, these “almost too good to be true” companies exist. Vote with your feet at every opportunity.
This has been my principal design consideration for a while now. Not "the code should be short!" or "the code should be elegant!" but "it should be easy to change" because your requirements are always going to change. It just so happens that the latter usually means things like single responsibility and loose coupling that bring about the former as a matter of course.
Of course scalable and performant is nice. I have also been on teams that delivered absolutely nothing because the KPIs were more important than the product.