I wish people who wrote these things would give a bit more context. Seems like the great temptation when writing about programming is to assume that your kind of work is the only kind of work any programmer ever does.

I write tools that help me test things. There are a lot of people like me who don’t work on big systems or write production code. Our priorities are different.

I need to duck tape a thing to another thing quickly. I happily accrue tech debt because getting my testing done today (not regression testing, but primary testing) is paramount. Later I will declare bankruptcy (abandon the code).

I work alone, mostly.

The dynamics change when I work with other guys, or when my software has to serve as a persistent framework into the future.

I’m just saying there are a lot of programmers like me. We are also interested in good craftsmanship— but we operate in a “battlefield” context, not a drawing room context.