I am a programmer and most of my time is spent debugging existing issues in production as a result of a mistake made initially or a poorly thought out change request that when deployed affects other part of the application.

I am a programmer and have been that since 2003.

I have mostly worked in Government or University.

I think the only way not to be a shitty programmer is to be a shitty programmer for a while. You need to just start doing it in a job. When you start, you will not be the one creating pages as the sole or main developer.

If you are never a shitty programmer you will never be able to be a good programmer. Until you crash the server or lock up a production database, cause timeouts, and frustrate a lot of end users with your shitty code, you will never learn to be a good coder.

To be good you need seat time and to be mentored, taught, and shown how to do things better. At some point, you become the one who teaches and shows others how to do it.

Even with all the seat time that I have, I am often asked to be a shitty coder in order to fix a bug without doing a deployment. Or I have to push a shitty piece of code due to a mistake in requirement gathering, or a mistake that was made a month before that would take too much time to fix. The idea being that it will work and we can still get it done. There is always a plan to go back and fix it. That just doesn't happen.

Just put in the time and after you have spent long enough, you will be better than good. You will still be asked to be a shitty programmer no matter what you do. At a certain point, you will review code, and ask your peers who wrote this piece of shit code. Then you will look at the source control and realize you wrote it a year and a half ago. You will just laugh fix it and move on.