It's all about context. You can preach to the choir here about life, liberty and the pursuit of hacking, and we will all (well most maybe) will agree with you and help you to carry your banner high.

BUT, when jobs, money, careers (and all that they imply) are "on the line" (real or imagined). It's an entirely different story. I have been around enough at various types of companies to know that sometimes its best to call it a "feature" rather than a "clever hack".

Some people don't see the aesthetic possiblities of code. Some think elegance in code is something for academics with tenure, and has no use in the workplace. And yes, you may find some of them will be your managers, and sometimes that's why they are "managers", they would rather not-code then code. They never saw it, and never will. Of course not all managers are this way, but even the good ones have to report to someone, and usually the further up the flagpole you run it, the less impressed they are with "clever bitmask hacks that save hundreds of lines of code". For them, it is about long term maintatinability (of the code and/or their jobs), your cleverness is of no use for them, especially since you may or may not be here in 2 weeks (by your choice or thiers).

Remember too that in the end, what we do has to be making money for someone, otherwise how would we get paid. The people who sign our paychecks will likely always be leary of "hacking", no matter if it produces "results" or not. Imagine if marketing had to put this in the product brochure:

This new release tar-ball contains hundred of clever hacks and cool bitmask tricks, making it a much more elegant and optimized code base. You will marvel at the aesthetic beauty of the code of our top hackers, and bask in the glory of how sweet this run's on the latest development release of Linux when compiled with the bleeding edge development release of gcc 3.5.0a.

Alot of times, this doesn't go over well with the people who actually buy the software (meaning sign the purchase order and cut the actual check). They are much more comfortable with things like:

The new XP-UltraExtreme 2.0 version of our product contains hundreds of new features to make you and your staff over 200% more productive in half the time. It's simple point-n-click Windows installation is a snap.

No matter if its a flat out lie or not.

Remember, no matter what Eric S. Raymond may say about what "hacking" is and isn't, Matthew Brodrick beat him too it, and had a much bigger marketing budget to work with.

-stvn