You are so right. I have been working in the 'software' industry in the Bay Area for 25 plus years. Its all about which group gets how much from the budget and how soon can you make the sales folks happy with a release yesterday with all kinds of 'look how cool' features! Anyone who claims that they have designed very well and their coding is as per the design and its great, etc does not know what they are talking about. No software ever gets built exactly as designed, no code is ever 'compliant' as per the zillion design paradigms like SOLID, Gang of Four, DDD, TDD, {insert any other fancy new design paradigm} And yes, developers, development managers, development VPs all need to keep their relevance important to the organization to continue getting paid. I stopped being a software idealist long ago. A lot of my clients like to get onto the latest 'fad' out there. If my client wants all functional style code, great here it is! If they want all OOPs and pure MVC code, great here it is! If you want the latest javascript framework 'wow how cool' type spaghetti code with HTML, JS, etc all mixed in a file - well here it is! Just approve my timesheet and pay me. I don't care if the code I write passes the Gang of Four, SOLID, blah blah benchmarks! As long as my client's software development head honcho is happy with my work and results, that's all I care for.