If the company has a government contract, the technical debt becomes a hidden feature. Government customers rarely have the ability to independently assess wha

If the company has a government contract, the technical debt becomes a hidden feature. Government customers rarely have the ability to independently assess what something should cost if done according to industry best practices. So what you do is bid low, with an extremely short time horizon to release. You get the contract, and now have license to run up a lot of technical debt, because it needs to be done fast and cheap. Now you get to maintenance phase. That's where the money is. The typical government customer is never willing to spend even one penny on paying off the principal on technical debt, but will make the installment payments forever. They will spend $100k on one new feature, but not even $0.01 on reducing the price of new features. Many still use SLOC as a management metric. So you run your codebase up to a million lines of code, when the software itself is just another glorified CRUD app. For bonus points, you give yourself 100% test coverage on a bunch of functions that have boolean "isUnitTest" parameters. I imagine this is similar to how VC firms loot companies by manipulating their financial structure. I find it to be extremely unethical, but there is literally nothing I can do individually to put a stop to it.