It's distressing how often I see this argument. I've been a proponent of keeping code tidy and tech debt under control for my whole career and all I've ever see

It's distressing how often I see this argument. I've been a proponent of keeping code tidy and tech debt under control for my whole career and all I've ever seen from other developers who do the same is much faster sustained development and far fewer bugs that waste time later. It's the teams who have let tech debt spiral out of control and jump from one quick change to another that I see drifting towards constant firefighting and never having time to do things properly. The argument made in defence of their abysmal performance when that happens is always some vague claim about needing to ship for business reasons at some important moment in the past and yet never considers that there will probably be many more important moments in the future (at least if the business is going to survive and prosper). I'm still waiting to see a startup fail because its developers wrote good code in the early stages.