I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago.

Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years.

I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particular action was running slow because it had to touch multiple files by necessity (he’d rolled his own sharding) — but generally speaking, it was a work of art more effective than anything I could’ve ever come up with. Sometimes the “dirty hacks” are the best solutions.

The avoidance of dirty hacks are not because they don’t work. They do and can be pretty X-effective when you’re short on X. But the end result is that when you need to switch away from the hacks, then the interest paid on X can be enormous. If X includes time, it may never be repaid.