I work for a small company (not a software/tech one) as a sysadmin and programmer and sometimes I feel almost ashamed of scripts or pieces of software because I know that they could be implemented much better or cleaner or this or that. I have some delusion that programmers working at other companies make better design decisions, better code, better tests, etc.
I love to read other programmer's battle stories! (I am currently reading "Coders at Work" and really enjoying it).
Just as a note:
Published in one of the journals (Psychological Science) that was mentioned a few days ago in another article about trying to replicate psychological experiments as part of the Open Science Framework ("Is Psychology About to Come Undone?" http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to...).
You can also search for the paper/final report: "NASA Study on Flight Software Complexity" to expand the topic.