> Quality engineering must always be balanced against the reality of finite budgets. Sure, lots of amazing engineering can be achieved in theory, _given infinit

> Quality engineering must always be balanced against the reality of finite budgets. Sure, lots of amazing engineering can be achieved in theory, _given infinite funding_. While this is obviously true, I don't think it depicts the actual decision making process that leads to messy codebases and crappy products. In my experience lack of experience and/or laziness play a big part. A competent tech lead that's passionate about quality AND is willing to be annoying for the greater good makes an enormous difference. I'm talking multiple orders of magnitude difference. It's the difference between spinning up a k8s cluster + service mesh vs tiny single server vps with basic failover. The former is thousands of hours of dev time across multiple disciplines while the latter a seasoned engineer can handle by themselves.