I've usually been in a position to choose that trade-off, due to having a career where I'm usually reporting to someone non-technical. I think of code quality

I've usually been in a position to choose that trade-off, due to having a career where I'm usually reporting to someone non-technical. I think of code quality as practices that reduce the risk of common or damaging errors. As a toy example, if you have a lot of off-by-one errors from loops, using list comprehensions instead reduces the risk of those errors, and would therefore be a code quality improvement. A larger example is writing code with well-defined interfaces that's easy to delete, in order to make it easy to replace bad decisions as our understanding of the problem improves (because there will always be some bad code.) I tend to place a very high value on code quality that affects errors I'm reasonably sure are common, and less value on practices where I can't see how they result in fewer errors.