"Remember Twitter story. When it was first started it was super buggy Rails app, that was down all the time" For every one of these examples there are 10 where

"Remember Twitter story. When it was first started it was super buggy Rails app, that was down all the time" For every one of these examples there are 10 where newly shipped code is not "super buggy". I've stopped using many services because of their attention to bugs was poor. Business value diminishes quickly when your product fails all over the place. sure you can find examples of companies that pulled through even with glaring problems, but there are also ones that succeeded because of competitive advantage from great code, and i dare to opinionate that the latter has a higher success rate. Should you rewrite entire code when it's bad? no, this is almost never the right move. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html