Feel free to write your artisanal code in your personal projects. But they don't belong in most companies' code base. You are a cog in the machine at these companies. Your role is to produce code that's easily understood by the next programmer. That's why coding guidelines exist.
that's why all those companies are using putty instead of their own ssh client; they're organizationally incapable of writing software of putty's quality
A lot of these companies don’t ship software at all, they write it only for internal use. It needs to be easily fixable by junior interns, not dependent on Bob the 100X programmer who decided to retire last week.
yeah, and of course you normally want as much as possible of your software to be easily fixable by junior interns in any case; that's always better when there's no compensating drawback
the implicit premise of your comment, however, seems to be that no such compensating drawback is possible, presumably because internal-use-only software isn't a competitive advantage. there are a lot of companies that think that way, but i think it's shortsighted; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39402299 for some examples of companies that discovered that it mattered a lot how good their internal-use-only software was
