I've recently started a job at a much larger, older company than anywhere I've worked before. Previously, I worked at companies with around ~5 developers, where

I've recently started a job at a much larger, older company than anywhere I've worked before. Previously, I worked at companies with around ~5 developers, where most of the code was at the very most 2 years old. Now, I'm working at a company with 90 developers (I think, we keep hiring people) and the oldest bits of the code are as much as 6 years old. I always have been a fan of writing clean code, and especially of achieving appropriate separation of concerns, but previously it has mostly been for aesthetic reasons. When your codebase is small and new enough that the people working on it are the original authors, it's fairly easy to deal with messy code. Now, I'm really beginning to see the impact crappy code has on an organization as it scales. The code at my company is actually mostly not too bad, and the management is very supportive of refactoring, but it's absolutely clear to me that were the code cleaner, we would get more done, faster. TL;DR; Writing bad code prevents you from writing good software (eventually.)