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I am working at one right now and I have worked at such in the past. One of the main tricks is to treat code reviews very seriously so people are not incentived to write lazy code. You need to build a cultire which cares about quality of both product and code. You also need decent developers, but not necessarily great developers.

It's very easy to go from what you're describing to a place hamstrung by nitpicking, though. The code review becomes more important than the code itself and appearances start mattering more than results.

Oh, I understand what you need to do. It's like losing weight. It's fairly simple.

And at the same time it's borderline impossible proven by the fact that people can't do it, even though everyone understands and roughly everyone agrees on how it works.

So the actual "trick" turns out to be understanding what keeps people from doing the necessary things that they all agree on are important – like treating code reviews very seriously. And getting that part right turns out to be fairly hard.

Did you make an effort to find those places and get them to hire you?

Some of them will get hired to fix the oceans of boilerplate code.