And then, five years after you've left the company and some system inevitably collapses with nobody having a clue as to what went wrong you'd finally realize the wisdom of all that.

But it's no longer your problem.

So, please don't take it personal, but 'the well intentioned types who write these articles' tend to be the people that then get called in to clean up the mess.

And then - belatedly - the job gets done properly to keep the company in business, assuming there is still time enough to do so.

Just this week I had a nice inside look at the kind of mess gets left behind when the original duct-tape-and-spit guy leaves the company and lets his former co-workers clean up their mess. It isn't pretty, and a chapter 11 isn't an unlikely scenario, so forgive me if I take a harsher than usual look at the attitude that causes this sort of thing.

Note that the 'free market' doesn't have a horizon much longer than the next quarterly shareholder report, and that your typical software product lives a multiple of that interval. So software made with short term goals in mind will create long term headaches.

Your two week marketing campaign gets a pass. But your decade long backend project does not, nor does your real time medical device controller, ECU, database system or operating system.