As the other response stated, it depends on what you mean by clean code. When used in a positive sense, “clean code” just means well written code that’s easy to

As the other response stated, it depends on what you mean by clean code. When used in a positive sense, “clean code” just means well written code that’s easy to reason and maintain. When referenced in the pejorative sense, it means “overly engineered”, or potentially that the author of the code spent an excessive amount of time writing something that could have been done much faster. As for whether or not clean code always delivers higher business value, the answer is no. Businesses rarely deal in absolutes and clean code is not always better. Business and engineering is just a huge game of trade offs, and code quality is just one knob you can turn up or down when discussing priorities for you and your team. Is it one you should frequently sacrifice to accomplish company goals? No. But, sometimes it makes sense.