When I started developing and was skeptical on my efficiency, one of the first things someone said to me was, "honestly, as long as it works, they'll be happy."

Aside from encouraging bad coding practices, would any of you give that same advice?

No. And efficiency is misunderstood by a lot of managers/clients. Some just see it as shipping as fast as possible without regard to quality. Everything seems fine until new features need to be added and it's near impossible to maintain because quality was not a priority, "going fast" was.

No unless you hate ur boss and plan to resign immediately. It will be a nice parting gift that will show itself when the system blows up in production after you've left and they have to scramble to fix it