By "following the right thing", I mean, with current bad code base, with limited delivery time from clients, at least set up a basic rules on how to write normal code. Just stop copy and paste the code when you need it, instead extract it into a method or function. Try think a little bit before writing, try to considering the future.
Today when I saw a spring controller imported both the service and it's implementation class, I was shocked.
Someone think the service is not exposing enough details to do the task, so instead of designing new functions, he just autowired the impl class and skipped the service interface.