What people sometimes fail to understand is that code is a mean to an end, not an end in itself.
If you want to make code for itself, work on an opensource and/or personal project. If you are paid to work on something, you're paid for the something to get out, not for it to feature the best code ever.
With the margins that tech makes, many companies could certainly afford to care more about code quality. But they don't, instead it gets stuffed into cash reserves where the money sits idle, doing nothing but enriching shareholders.
Or hiring useless business people to install around the periphery of engineering. Which is funny because now tech is letting all those folks go.
