Keep the goals of the code in mind: providing its users value. It's a tool, even if you think code should be art. The code's purpose is not to look pretty or to get best marks in static analysis. It's this code that earned the company the money they are spending now on you. Clean code pays off in the long run, but might make you go bust in the short term. In the beginning of a project, it's usually a prototype and it needs to prove itself. Once it has generated some value, you can consider either spending time for quality improvements to negate the tech debt, or you re-write it with everything you have learnt from the previous version.