If you have good software, you can more safely use the software without a full-time developer to do maintenance on it. I have worked in shops that intentionall

If you have good software, you can more safely use the software without a full-time developer to do maintenance on it. I have worked in shops that intentionally deliver bad software, and those that had higher ethical standards, and the only difference on the business side was that the bad software had higher budgets and more permanent employees (both more-permanent employees and more permanent-employees). The problem is that all the people who can tell the difference between good and bad are employed by the contractors. The direct government employees are still counting SLoC and basing their UI requirements on the Excel spreadsheets that were directly copied from paper forms from the 1970s. I am not making this up. The contract awards are still mostly based on who you know, rather than the quality of your past work, so given the choice between a slipshod initial implementation with a juicy back end in the form of continual maintenance and doing it right the first time and delivering something that never needs contractor support ever again, it isn't surprising that a lot of companies opt for the former even when most of their employees would prefer the latter.