To me the real question is not about shipping products vs good programmers. There is is a much more important question when it comes to writing ugly or pretty code:
Does it work and will you maintain it?
In my experience I often had to often fix dozens of critical bugs of "getting things done" programmers.
I often hear "I will fix this later", "I will refactor it later", "but it works", "we can write tests later", "I will comment/document later", "I will clean up later" from these people giving it to maintenance programmers who rewrite the stuff, cause it is too ugly to deal with.
That's a big problem. People write code and other people have to fix this "but it works" code. Great, when you have a node.js application only running cause there is try catches around things hiding all the errors, killing the logging back end.
If you are the only one to read the code than it's fine to do whatever you want with it, as long as it works. But usually code that really works is well-written, well-commented, tested, etc.
Does it work and will you maintain it?
In my experience I often had to often fix dozens of critical bugs of "getting things done" programmers.
I often hear "I will fix this later", "I will refactor it later", "but it works", "we can write tests later", "I will comment/document later", "I will clean up later" from these people giving it to maintenance programmers who rewrite the stuff, cause it is too ugly to deal with.
That's a big problem. People write code and other people have to fix this "but it works" code. Great, when you have a node.js application only running cause there is try catches around things hiding all the errors, killing the logging back end.
If you are the only one to read the code than it's fine to do whatever you want with it, as long as it works. But usually code that really works is well-written, well-commented, tested, etc.