[Smudge]

Perhaps, with the right kinds of expectations and code review processes, many of the "high performers" to which he refers end up becoming the "low performers" that you see as the cause of most technical debt. People who, in one environment, are able to ship buggy code quickly (and without much consideration) find themselves, in a different environment, spending abnormal amounts of time writing and reworking code in order to get it through a code review process.

He kind of mentions it, but in a very early-stage startup, the ability to deliver MVPs quickly (regardless of code quality) may be seen as a positive trait. Of course, even better is when you can ship quality code just as quickly, but such developers are probably the exception to the rule.