But in general, the companies we've heard of are the ones who survived long enough to become well known True! and in that case, I suspect that their code is v

But in general, the companies we've heard of are the ones who survived long enough to become well known True! and in that case, I suspect that their code is very maintainable Unfortunately, there's no relation between a code's maintainability and its business viability. For example, if that were true, then there would be a correlation between beautiful codebases and codebases which make money. In my experience there is no such correlation. Businesses generally maintain their codebases by hiring people to work on it rather than adopting good practices from the start (so that they don't have to hire more people to work on it). That's why startups have another advantage: they can work much faster than big companies, because big companies generally have to deal with ten metaphorical tons of code bloat, which slows them down almost as much as their bureaucratic nature.