[closeparen]

When you’re starting to have craftsmanship, taste, a sense of quality, whatever you want to call it, being surrounded by what you can now recognize as bad work is distressing. Especially when no one else is even acknowledging it.

Is this the kind of person I am? Is this the kind of team I belong on? Where shit like this is treated as normal and passes without comment?

It’s a powerful anxiety. Speaking it out loud is a natural step, and it’s easy to see why people reach for it. Suppressing or forgetting about it is also an option, but people tend to correctly recognize that they’ll die a little inside by doing that.

It takes experience and maturity to find productive ways of channeling that feeling. People don’t always get there right away. If you think you have, model it. Show healthy ways of dealing with the “holy shit this is garbage” feeling.

If you really need people to swim in shit uncomplainingly, then either a) hire junior people who can’t even tell what’s wrong with it or b) expect to pay a premium for senior talent knowingly specializing in that niche. Your team might just not be a fit for people who want to do good work.

[brianaluv]

I understand what you mean. However, I said earlier that I have no problem with improving poorly written code. But I also said that I spent enough time on this particular project to know that some problems that existed before (and no longer exist today), prevented us from writing clean code and were not related to the quality of the developers (some of whom are making fun of today). In other words, the problem is not that the old developers didn't know how to produce good quality code, it's that they didn't always have the possibility. Come on, do you all work on projects where everything runs as smooth as you want?

>> It takes experience and maturity to find productive ways of channeling that feeling. People don’t always get there right away. If you think you have, model it. Show healthy ways of dealing with the “holy shit this is garbage” feeling. If I knew, I wouldn't have asked the question.

But your answer makes me think that the term "arrogance" I used in the title of my question may be too strong...I dunno...