tl:dr version - companies hire software developers to solve business problems, not to write software. Most of the time, good enough is all is takes. You do not

tl:dr version - companies hire software developers to solve business problems, not to write software. Most of the time, good enough is all is takes. You do not need PhDs working on your corp software to get good enough. I think that one of the main point here may be being lost. Most of the arguments I read here argue the point from the programmer's perspective. What is the employer's perspective? They hold most of, if not, all the cards? And the story is about employers not acting to tap a resource (this PhD) that clearly should be valuable to them. Businesses hire programmers to write software to solve business problems. In most cases, these business problems are operational in nature - managing information to run a process. Writing software for software's sake is not the primary objective of most businesses. This means that most businesses are more than happy with good enough. Systems do not have to be especially robust, they just have to be good enough to run business operations. In the case of companies like Google (whose primary business objective is to sell ads so as to make money), the software is complicated because they way they sell ads is complicated. The software has to be robust because it is used by many users simultaneously, is run on multiple machines at the same time (for many definitions of machine from Google Glass to phones to desktops to tablets to Nest thermostats) and needs to be integrated across all of this in a way that makes the whole much greater than the sum of its parts by many many software developers (PhD. or not). This need for a complex set of systems to function in a fast and reliable way is the reason that coding quality is a key issue at play. Software is the primary asset for these orgs that allows them to make money and they manage it carefully and spend big money on it. In hospitals, it is staff, equipment and drugs - that is where the money goes. In schools, it is meant to be teachers (and kids) but we have that one wrong. For most other businesses, there is some other asset that is key to success and the money will always go there, not to software. Businesses typically make the decision to have just good enough for software to run ops especially if this software is running on in house systems for use by staff.