Do it Right – There is No Trade-Off
I've been thinking a lot about a conversation I had with my manager about producing versus well thought-out design. He seemed to think that it was a trade-off, and the more I think about it, I think he's wrong. Oh sure, there are tons of trade-offs in engineering and software development, but there isn't a trade-off in putting out good code every day, and doing it "right". There can't be.
If I'm putting out a bunch of features in a day - every day, then they can't be hacks, or some day they are going to catch up with me and make it impossible to go forward. That's not sustainable. What is sustainable is to make sure that you're writing good code… well thought out code… but you're doing it like you mean it.
For example, today I had to go through a lot of code written by one of the Code Monkeys that was really slapped together and included no documentation at all. It was a rules system and it wasn't working cleanly because the methods were quite the rules, and they weren't quite the factors of the rules, so there were nasty dependencies, etc. that made it very hard to figure out what was happening and how to fix it.
I had to clean it all up, make the methods either condition checks or rules, and all rules simply were collections of condition checks, had to clean up some of the tests based on the logging strings, and in general, just make it a lot cleaner.
This didn't take me long, and it took me a lot less time - even under pressure of fixing bugs, then it did to create it by the original author. So it's not about the time required, it's the actions that are taken.
There's no trade-off here. You have to be good at what you're doing or you're going to make a mess. Period.