> Does it boil down to the quality and experience of the hackers on the team?

Yes. But also requires management who can understand and value what they have in that team.

I think one good threshold for most startups is product-market fit.

Before you have it, you should be willing to accumulate large amounts of tech debt both because your product might change enough that you'd be rapidly throwing out large amounts of code anyways and because having product-market fit is such an overwhelming need that almost everything should be traded against it because your startup is dead without it.

After you have it, you have to be much more diligent about paying down tech debt, because you switch from a more "exploratory" mode to a "refinement" mode where you now are unlikely to be throwing away large swaths of your code at the drop of a hat, and instead need to iteratively build upon what you already have and that becomes very difficult to do with large amounts of tech debt.

I think engineers are super bad at deciding where to take on technical debt. Often people will save themselves half a day at the cost of making some future feature nearly impossible. I don't really blame the engineers, but rather the system -- the customers demand new things, then there are biweekly "sprints" to set deadlines, and there are daily standups where nobody wants to say "I'm doing the same thing I did yesterday and it's not done yet." In that system, saving five minutes at any cost is the right thing to do, and then you get boiled alive by your technical debt.

I honestly think that the glacial pace of software engineering is mostly due to this phenomenon -- "where can we save a little bit of time today?" and then it snowballs into entire teams not getting anything done. The interest on the loan they took out is higher than their income. I guess that's why they call it technical debt. (Does that make Scrum Masters technical loan sharks?)

Choose a better tech stack IMO. One that facilitates the pits of success rather than pits of failure.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Recently I was trying to connect to a meeting on a train journey through a rural lake district with less than ideal connectivity. Zoom with screen share (cam off though) was more functional than text mode Slack, which kind of blows my mind. I miss IRC.