You're right, but it misses what's really happening: it's a trade off between short-term and long-term productivity. Essentially, writing bad but working code q

You're right, but it misses what's really happening: it's a trade off between short-term and long-term productivity. Essentially, writing bad but working code quickly today means technical debt, bugs, and taking longer to add features later. Decent developers can avoid this trade off, and write decent code in the first place in about the same time. The trouble is, the CEO typically can't tell the difference. Even long term, it's hard to identify if something is taking long because the team is rewriting crappy code or undoing shortcuts, or the task is just difficult.