What I've learned is that most companies that are really not in it for the long haul and just want to exit will pass the technical debt off to a much larger com

What I've learned is that most companies that are really not in it for the long haul and just want to exit will pass the technical debt off to a much larger company that can supposedly shoulder the burdens of technical debt. The M&A process at large companies really don't look at how sustainable the codebase or infrastructure is - they only look at regulatory liabilities like super bad security practices and that's only if you're in a strongly regulated industry. So, the current incentives mean "bang out code super fast, get rich, and someone else will figure it out." This attitude is a huge part of how so many bad acquisitions seem to be happening for the past maybe 10 years by various large technology companies as the VC owned market has grown so much compared to IPOed companies. Companies like HP, Yahoo, Dell, IBM, etc. are all in varying states of decomposition. Yes, the major tech giants are doing just fine but their M&A approach seems to be substantially different and they try to take on smaller companies and grow them before they have too much inertia keeping them from being adaptable. Enterprise integration is a really hard problem that at this point is almost entirely impossible to approach algorithmically or from a technical solution. Sadly, you're not about to impress anyone in a technical interview how you managed to get a company's horrendous codebase to cleanly integrate with a big behemoth ESB - that doesn't signal anything about your ability to code or work with others evidently. Worse for the acquirer, the refactoring and painstaking tasks of integration are usually done with an army of hired guns that are very expensive and the work is non-scalable due to being entirely business-specific. In the process leading to the acquisition, many execs burn through their technical staff or their cap tables are messy and they wind up giving little to the engineers. The resentment alone causes a mass exodus and those most knowledgeable about the codebase depart while the execs have solidly backed their exits legally to get plenty of compensation while marking off a successful exit for future investors to look at as a positive signal for investment. Golden parachutes and different kinds of leashes hardly help until the next company trying to do the very same thing comes calling renewing the cycle of rewarding throwaway technology and IP. Then again in enterprise, 90% of what's being bought are patents and customer bases that have high switching costs with some vague notion of "alignment" with some marketecture diagram made by someone that hasn't touched or seen anything besides a sales demo in decades, so perhaps perception and suspension of disbelief is all that matters. In many respects, I view a lot of codebases out there as evidence of the tragedy of the commons - it is a side effect of ignored externalities by every actor. There are so few incentives put into the market to make the cost of software maintenance lower it's mind-boggling how technology companies can stay in business.