I think this is more of a survivorship bias thing. If a bunch of companies write bad code and a few of them survive, so you work at those companies and see the

I think this is more of a survivorship bias thing. If a bunch of companies write bad code and a few of them survive, so you work at those companies and see their bad code, it isn't necessarily true that permitting bad code enabled them to succeed. It may be that writing better code would've made them even more likely to succeed, but the advocates of better code were not able to make that case to stressed out management. I've almost never seen a situation where intentionally bad code has helped even in the short term. Maybe bad code was the best that a particular engineer could do, and nobody else was available to do it, so that made it acceptable. But any engineer writing code less well than they are able to has never led to anything good in my experience. Even in 45 minute interviews, if I take shortcuts, I usually end up creating more problems for myself than if I had just written code the right way in the first place.