[eabraham]

This is a very interesting idea and something I am questioning at the startup I'm currently working for (~50 engineers). I don't think the idea of software quality and time to market are diametrically opposite ideas. I'm the tech lead of an infrastructure team and we have been focusing on refactoring some of the most egregious code. After completing a few of these projects, my team has noticed that the development speed of some of the teams interfacing with our refactored code have seen improvement. Small projects with 5 day estimates are completing in 3 days and engineers are not as frustrated at the state of the codebase.

I understand that time to market can sometimes be a differentiator and its acceptable to build a quick and dirty MVP. Version one of a startup's codebase is going to be messy because you are constantly making tradeoffs to survive. Once the startup leaves crunch mode, engineering leadership should be allocating at least 10% of engineering time to refactoring. Otherwise the bloated, unstructured codebase could be holding the organization back from building the next market defining feature in time to beat the competition.