I find myself pondering this question times and times again. I want to do things the right way, to write a clean, understandable, correct code that is easy to maintain, but what I really do pretty often is writing a patch upon patch just because there is no time, clients are waiting, a bug should be fixed overnight, the company is losing money on this problem, a manager is pressing hard etc. etc.

I know perfectly well that in a long shot I am wasting much more time on these patches, but as this time is spread over months of work, nobody cares. Also, as one of my managers used to say, we don't know if there will be this long shot if we will not fix it now.

I am sure I am not the only one entrapped in this endless real/ideal choices. So how you, fellow programmers, are coping with this?