I too have met many developers who have developed the mindset that good code is impossible. That is really sad.

Imagine a carpenter that says straight cuts aren't possible, just because they never maintained their tools and the last 10 cuts came out wrong.

Of course good code is possible. But not every person is going to write it and it is not going to happen under all possible circumstances and in all given project structures.

Our job as professional software people is to be able to judge how to create the circumstances and the time frames under which good code can be written — and to say No to projects that cannot be written by us and our team.