alt Hacker NewsI think about this a lot. My belief is professional programmers should not be artists.
I think about other professions. A cook cannot spend time making every dish perfect. A bricklayer isn't perfectly aligning every brick. Even in movie-making there's a shooting schedule. Things go wrong and the best filmmakers know how to keep the production moving.
I love the craft of programming, but I see a lot other craft-oriented programmers who want every line to be beautiful. If you want to write code poetry in your off-time, that's your business. But that's not the job.
At work we are bricklayers and cooks. We practice a craft, but also have time constraints. I try to do my best work while working at pace. Sometimes my code could be better, but it's not worth the time to fix. Ultimately the thing we make is the running software, not what's under the hood. The business people are sometimes right
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The bricklayer's building that falls over, or the cook that makes food that tastes bad and no one wants to eat and makes people sick isn't going to have a job for very long, however. And of course, the job of "cook" runs the gamut from minimum wage at a shitty diner, to being very well paid at a Michelin star restaurant. So shipping code > beautiful code, but three years from now, that one "quick and dirty hack" just to get the next version out the door has become three hundred hacks, and that tech debt is a liability preventing any movement, either fixing existing bugs or in shipping new features.
So maybe not every line of code needs to be even more beautiful than the last, but there's clearly a balance to be had. And yes, sometimes the business people are right. Sometimes they are wrong, however.
> A cook cannot spend time making every dish perfect.
That's too generalised. A fast food cook can't spend time to make things perfect. A tiny, fancy Japanese place will spend time to manually craft a perfect dish and you'll wait while watching the whole process.
I suspect that you can find something similar in every category you mentioned.