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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

I think the other replies miss an important part of your comment:

Some of these projects were so late in their deadlines that had to be canceled

Speed is really important a lot more often than devs like to acknowledge when a company is small and fighting for its life to get revenue, let alone become profitable, and the code debt is often worth it. Fixing the code debt itself doesn't need to be any more thorough than necessary either.

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> and the code debt is often worth it.

This is something that I like about the metaphor of 'code debt', and which tends to go over peoples head: debt can be a perfectly fine instrument, and just like a real debt, it can be a good thing when leveraged wisely. The issue is more when debt is treated as 'free money', and is used carelessly.

At the same time, companies often fail to invest into long-term goals, like maintainability, increasing test coverage, or even bettering the internal UI, even when it’s their core, business-critical product.

And the other part is just the sheer amount of projects that can't deliver that "speed" after a year or two because shoddy, quick and poor decisions were made around code quality. Once you find out that your startup chose the wrong architecture because "we need to do it fast" and it needs to stop pivoting for 6 months to unfsck themselves, it's mostly too late.

Unfortunately people who create those monstrosities hide behind the same "keep it simple and quick" excuse than people who know how to prioritize.

It's interesting how many people here ignore that scenario - it's surprisingly common. Is it because most of developers jump ship at that point?

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