Comment by elb0w

I can appreciate this point of view but I think you are missing out. We learn as programmer's by making mistakes and experience. Familiarizing yourself with a crappy codebase (you didn't write) not only helps you get better at debugging but holds a wealth of experience of what not to do. As you don't write shitty code yourself, how else will you learn to deal with these problems? Everything we do should be to further our own skill set. My first real programming job was working with quants who wrote 1k single procedure Perl scripts, you had to scroll your editor to the right to see all the indentation from conditionals. When I look back it's one of my most valuable learning experiences.