> Your job is to do what the company pays you for.
The problem with this mindset is the most companies are short-sighted and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under pressure.
It is the developer being paged at 2am on a Sunday. It is the developer working overtime to get the feature out because the codebase is a giant mess. Etc.
Having a minimum quality bar is a must. The OP was suggesting a professional level of quality - not gold plating everything.
The best course if you find yourself employed by such a company is to change employers. A company that is genuinely short-sighted is dysfunctional and no amount of professionalism on your part as an individual contributor is going to fix that. Now if you could get yourself promoted to management, then maybe you could have an impact--but then you wouldn't be doing actual software engineering any more, you'd be doing corporate management fixing, which is a different job.
> and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under pressure.
Yes, this is true. And as above, if it's genuinely dysfunctional, your best course, unless you are willing and able to become a manager yourself, is to change employers.
> Having a minimum quality bar is a must. The OP was suggesting a professional level of quality - not gold plating everything.
That's not what "write great software" means to me. "Great" is not the same as "minimum quality bar".
The problem with this mindset is the most companies are short-sighted and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under pressure.
It is the developer being paged at 2am on a Sunday. It is the developer working overtime to get the feature out because the codebase is a giant mess. Etc.
Having a minimum quality bar is a must. The OP was suggesting a professional level of quality - not gold plating everything.