Software is the one discipline we can have perfection. In every other engineering there are tolerances, unknowns we have to yield to nature. In software we are god. We're just a lazy and stupid god.

Anecdotal, I had a coworker working on a new feature in a huge code base. I was trying to ignore the pseudocode planning they put on the board. After a moment of frustration I wrote down 6 conditionals that simplified what would become hundreds of new lines, to those 6 statement, and capture a few more corner cases they had not worked out yet.

Months later I got a green light on a total overhaul of the larger code base and we turned a massive code base into a fully automated and effectively bullet proof distributed system because I took the time to apply engineering principles to.the problem. The code wasn't always the most proper (I did things downright sinful) but the system was organized like an engineering project with interdependent subsystem instead of a rube Goldberg kludge of new.function on old. That overhaul too less time than any of the prior incremental feature updates prior.