[hinkley]

> I should never bother to spend an extra hour on making it more maintainable if I expect that the cost of that decision will be born by one of my teammates.

If you want to be a team lead, though, or even just have people follow your lead, I find that not only do you want to worry about these costs, but you need to talk openly about them, and be seen addressing it. Most devs follow the ones they trust, no matter what title they have.

On all the projects where we tried to build people up instead of get shit done, we were consistently getting more shit done at the two year mark, if not sooner. Any idiot can ship a version 1.0.0, but it takes some talent (and luck) to ship version 2.3.0

From what I’ve seen, Postgres followed a similar model, and if you look at the performance benchmarks over time, it has progressively narrowed the gap with each major release. That kind of momentum is something worth sacrificing for.

[mumblemumble]

> If you want to be a team lead, though... you want to worry about these costs...

This may depend on the extent to which your organization conforms to the Peter principle.