I define good code in terms of economics, the whole point of writing code is to generate some sort of benefit. The nature of the utility that is created by code

I define good code in terms of economics, the whole point of writing code is to generate some sort of benefit. The nature of the utility that is created by code is therefore heavily context dependent. So from this perspective I'd argue that code should never aim to be "bad", if such a situation is coming up it strongly hints that a discussion about the goals of the code and why it exists is badly needed. Also organizations that aim for "bad" in certain departments have a nasty tendency to generate cultural and political issues that become toxic for the organizations as time goes on. As for some of these questions: a) Yes I've seen a few companies go under because their code wasn't able to generate profits. A couple of times it's been so bad that customers didn't get what they needed immediately as a result. But usually the sorts of company failure modes from bad code are less dramatic. Sometimes this is like bad debt in that it looks good initially but comes at an existential cost later. Other times it's been more boring like lower velocity making the company uncompetative or too expensive to run. b) If you are thinking of trading features vs code quality you've already lost because this isn't something that can be traded. c) Writing some tests tends to be a pareto-optimal choice, in the sense that lower defect counts tend to allow you to create more economic value from the limited software development staff you have in a given time frame. Frequently you'll find that having some tests allows you to deliver things like features more efficiently than you would without them. High defect counts tend to result in not meeting requirements or unnecessary rework. There's a sweet spot here about tests and test coverage, there's definitely diminishing returns and getting to 100% coverage is very expensive because of the last few percent being disproportionately hard to get while not being worth the cost of getting it in many cases.