The truth of it is that the startup life isn't for every engineer. Startup code is messy. You don't have architects who draw UMLs for you, you don't have the luxury of time to do things right. At a small startup everything is often falling apart at the seams. Morale can rise and crash, repeatedly, like a roller coaster. Small startups often have to visit the iron bank of technical debt and take out a huge loan to put in that feature a very important customer wants right that second. Tests are very important, but spending too much on them can waste precious time. You're always flying low to the ground. You're looking at the short term: days and weeks, not months and years. That said, technical debt sucks and should be avoided at all cost, but priorities aren't the same when you're a three or four person team with about a year's worth of runway.