I'm one step below the CTO, but here's my perspective for what it is worth. It really depends on the stage of development your company is in. When you're first starting out, writing "good quality code" is about the worst thing you can invest in. The fact is, the code you're writing is almost certainly the wrong thing. A new startup is a hypothesis on a business model, and the first bit of code is to make the most basic tests of the hypothesis. It's VERY rare you get it right your first try. Writing good quality code is a long term investment, but if there's no one willing to buy it, it's a bad investment that will never have an ROI. On the other hand, if you're rewriting the system because now you know the market, and you know what it wants and you're scaling to meet it, now tech debt is bad. I think it's critical to understand the first system can and probably will be thrown away, so it makes little sense to build it to "scale".