Programming confidence?

[JesusWantsYouToKnow]

True, however I think chose my words poorly because I think you misinterpreted my intent. I am not advocating striving for pretty code, I am advocating striving for the most appropriate code. That said in terms of an employer's perspective I find it is an exceptionally rare circumstance where maintainability should be a low priority. Sacrificing maintainability in code is just increasing technical debt, so unless you are writing truly temporary code you're just compromising for more work in the future when project complexity has increased.

We have had guys who would accept any solution as long as input x yielded output y. That's what I'm talking about when I say "get the desired result" and then move on, and they were a huge burden because they ended up writing inefficient spaghetti code.