Wish it was like that in the UK. I work with some pretty talented people and we're paid what would be considered peanuts in the bay area (but fairly standard here), and even then half of us have just been furloughed. Lots of code sucks but that's often due to unrealistic deadlines as much as the talents of the developers.
Code sucks everywhere. Unless you're working on a library or something personal, then there's no (or very few) organisations that are churning out 'academically pure' code. The UK doesn't software industry doesn't have dibs on that.
Some companies write code that's public, and then, while it might still suck, there is at least some motivation for improving it, and a better chance of it being paletable.
I've worked for a company which had a 100% open-source product and their priority was to keep that boat floating rather than making any improvements.
Probably because the resource requirements to actually be able to do that were way above what they had at their disposal. Especially having such an old codebase.
The time it takes to make simple updates should be enough motivation. I just spent the best part of a day adding a simple dialog before submitting a form. Took forever to get the development environment put together to run the code locally then trying to understand the mess of JavaScript in the relevant function with all it's nested callbacks to add a couple of lines of code. I tried refactoring it a bit, hopefully its a bit more readable for the next person. I doubt anyone will actually give a shit though.
Yup. A lot of processes and reviews are put into place. But once the business demands something to be done at a certain date, all of that usually takes a backseat or even thrown out the window.
