There’s an argument that engineers should care about code quality. Teams and companies make specific and targeted efforts to keep the quality of their codebases high. The existence of activities like “spring cleaning”, “test Fridays”, “Fixit week” and others assert the importance of code maintenance, giving engineers the breathing room to fix complex, hairy issues that take more than a day or two of time and focus to solve. Some engineers (I do) will talk about the problem of “poor quality code”, “bad code”, or “spaghetti code” as if the code wasn’t written by engineers just like ourselves, but the bottom line is, every engineer can likely find a piece of code they wrote that they aren’t proud of today.