[ryandrake]

The root of all of these is: nobody really cares. The PM is just trying to cram features X, Y, and Z in before the sprint ends so that metrics A, B, and C can go up. The engineer (as you said) just wants to close tickets and implements whatever is in the ticket, regardless of whether it's the right way. QA probably caught this, but the ticket was prioritized as a P3 and buried with the other 459 P3 bugs that nobody is ever going to look at. The senior exec doesn't even know what autofocus is and just wants the $ chart to go up rather than down. He's really the only one on the totem pole with any power to say "Wait, stop, this isn't right--it isn't beautiful, it isn't complete, and the little details matter." But he won't because he is a businessman, not a craftsman.

Another post in two weeks that reminds me of that S.Jobs quote I lean on a lot: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Nobody seems to care about the aesthetic or quality anymore. Software development has become a beige, boring assembly line where brains go in as input and "Metrics Go Up" comes out the other end of the factory.

[htfu]

I care, and where I work (as a coder) what I care about does matter. Or I make it matter.

You sound depressed. Maybe try find a smaller shop where you have more influence?