Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-even point is usually at a lower level of quality than engineers would like it to be. Leadership and engineering managers know this and behave accordingly.
One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need entirely at the lowest cost in the shortest time, but more often that not, the last term gets 90% of the attention.
Do they? I’ve been fighting against the tide for years until I understood that all of quality this and quality that doesn’t matter. Sure, it sucks to be on the receiving end of buggy software, but this where you vote with your money. At work? Finish the task with least amount of resources and move on.
I think it’s like switching CEOs when the company goes out of startup mode into grownup company. What got you here won’t keep you here.
which is now claude code...
I've been doing this for decades, it's never a problem. Either velocity tanks in which case there's a short period where company invests into improving it, or people leave.
If you're working at a company who disregards safety and security good luck getting them to care about clean code and efficiency.
But I'm curious about how one prevents this dysfunctional culture.
It’s just really hard to overstate how much damage a bunch of crappy code can have. Even with the best of intentions. I must say I strongly disagree that this is “never a problem”.