Elitism as the mid-career growth engine
I had a similar experience when I got into software.
As a junior, more than once I wished to just to quit the field - even after years of CS studies &amp; it being one of the best opportunities one can have in my area.<p>The draining nature of the &quot;this is shit, we need to do clean code&quot; and &quot;TDD is the way&quot; discussions being constantly repeated day-in day-out, can quickly kill any interest in working on code. It&#x27;s not that far from being forced to write a book using a 100 most common word list and if you use any word outside of that, you&#x27;re a shit writer because it will make it harder for others to read, because you used a word that&#x27;s not in the most common word list...<p>I&#x27;m quite glad that I moved away from that corporate environment into startup space a year later, which showed a whole different perspective. Where code itself is useless and what mattered is if it delivered value. If your hacky solution can deliver value - then you can justify making it better. Otherwise - who cares.<p>I do think there&#x27;s way too much attachment to code &amp; its perceived quality in the dev community. On the other hand, if you work in a team where majority of people are well into their careers - there&#x27;s a lot more nuance when it comes to the extremes such as &quot;TDD all day all night&quot; and &quot;daily pair programming&quot;. They are seen as tools to utilise when appropriate, rather than mantras to be repeated mindlessly.