Yes. This is the difference in perspective between a company founded by a technical person (or someone who has a competent technical "right hand") and one found

Yes. This is the difference in perspective between a company founded by a technical person (or someone who has a competent technical "right hand") and one founded by a non technical person. A company can succeed for many years, 10+, with a non technical person. At some point the decisions made and the shortcuts will start to catch up. Having worked on legacy code bases with version control you start to see patterns. While there are definitely those decisions made because they were required at the time there are also definitely those individuals who obviously were out of their depth or were willing to "hack it" to get it to work. And a lot of times, they are lauded as being "A+ top producers" when the reality was they just did it faster than everyone else because they didn't think about long-term quality. The story version, I see in terms of manufacturing. If I was working with a parts supplier and asked for them to deliver a part I needed. The requirement was as fast as they could do it. They make good on the delivery. From a business perspective everything is great. We're making sales and we met our deadlines. The supplier was great in helping us out. Suddenly three years into our five year warranty parts from the supplier start failing (performance problems and fragile releases). It becomes obvious there's a major quality problem in the parts that were manufactured. We talk to the parts supplier but they've gone insolvent (the software engineer left the company). Suddenly we need to hire a new parts supplier (a new software engineer with years of experience) to rush the replacement parts that are required to meet our warranty. Which, (hopefully) having learned our lesson are paying the higher rate (proper compensation and reasonable time for quality) to guarantee a quality replacement part to prevent the loss of profits of another round of extended warranty replacements. At this point the company has just cost itself both monetarily and potentially in reputation by making the original decision to fast-track production to "get to market". I recognize that the scenario above isn't software. It's a physical thing that's gone out into the world out of the control of the company that created it. But fundamentally the same trade-off of "deliver it now" vs "deliver it right" is made. And often made by people who don't never consider the long-term costs (technical debt) because "that's not now, that's in the future". And people will often rationalize their decisions in these situations. The often spoken: Over confidence "That happens to other companies, we'll be successful." Lack of understanding "I don't care about the outcome, we need it now." Individual worship "John said we could do it, so we're doing it." Punting "We'll deal with it once we have slack time."