[cm3]

> His focus on quality is a trait that often seems to go unrewarded

In most companies focus on quality is something you're precluded from having, and usually it's in the same category as security and maintainability (refactoring). I've been in various planning meetings where I wasn't able to convince the dev team manager to allow time for such things, because they stubbornly wouldn't accept that these things will pay dividends sooner than they believe. As a result in most code bases it's: prototype -> production -> patch, patch, patch. This is the norm but there are also places that know better and you don't have to convince anyone of the benefits.

[WalterBright]

Refactoring can be its own source of problems. I've seen far too many refactorings that merely exchanged one mess for another. I'm a bit sympathetic to a manager who is skeptical of refactorings.

[cm3]

Definitely, I've seen those kind of refactorings too, but what I mean is that one isn't allowed to fix the architectural problems that make it hard or impossible to implement what's requested. The existing design didn't anticipate certain things which are now impossible to implement without compromising the architecture.

[cm3]

One of managers' most important jobs is to keep the devs unbothered by the outside world or misguided product managers. But this can go wrong when the manager filters stuff that would have been great to implement.