You're not dealing with the geniuses. You're likely just dealing with people smarter than you. I can assure you geniuses are rare, and people of the same intelligence level tend to gather so you can go through a career completely missing them depending on where you work. There's enough noise such that among these groups you won't notice the correlation.
Tbh the geniuses don't view their own code as shitty, to them it's quality. It's only viewed as shitty externally.
It's the genius programmers who write the shittiest code. In my experience clean code tends to be a waste of time for geniuses because shitty code isn't really a problem for smarter people.
The further away you are from genius the greater the tendency for you to write cleaner code because you need it in order to deal with the complexity.
What's common among HN readers is that they think they're smart. So you may be reading this and thinking "Wait a minute, this isn't true! I'm smart and I like clean code!". Well, I hate to break it to you. The truth hurts because most likely one of those two attributes probably doesn't actually describe you.
Also as a side mention, I'm a clean code Nazi. My code is really clean.
Not necessarily more trust for a corporation by virtue of the corporation not being government.
I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.
You'd have to be ok with doing a lot of f-ed up shit working for the NSA. Enough shit to cause someone like Snowden to Exile himself as a whistleblower.
There is no-doubt in my mind a lot of those programs are still running and new ones have been initiated.
Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit.
Tbh the geniuses don't view their own code as shitty, to them it's quality. It's only viewed as shitty externally.