Comment by antonvs
3 hours ago
Sure. Businesses often - more often than not! - initially write code that's less readable, less maintainable, less elegant etc. on the first, second, third, nth iteration. And then later, if it becomes an issue, they address any limitations that are actually affecting the business.
I'm actually a fan of code as art, but the average business system is not that. Elegance doesn't usually matter. Extensibility only matters if the product is such that extensibility is essential - in which case the business will probably figure that out after a few iterations, or fail in some way.
There are some kinds of software where all these properties might help it succeed, but again it's not typical business software. A banking or trading or healthcare management system is not going to be art.
This is just a description of your experience. I've worked at places where the performance requirements were very clear up front and "it works" was not good enough for a first version. If you haven't that's fine, but it doesn't mean that every gig allows you to iterate on some piece of junk. Sometimes you really do need to get it right in various ways on the first try.