[jleask]

I'm a Chartered Engineer in the UK and no employer has ever cared. Perhaps they might if I worked in a safety critical arena such as aviation but certainly not in suit and tie business software land.

The problem is that although people moan about rubbishy software it very rarely physically hurts anybody and can be fixed in future releases. This means people are unwilling to pay the extra cost of software being more mature and 'engineered' on delivery. There's a lot of software that would be not be economically viable if it was to be held to a higher standard. If a bridge failing could be guaranteed not to hurt nobody and could be put right in a day or so but be like 1/10th of the cost structural engineers would be held to a lesser standard to.

That said, the financial cost of poor security that comes from a lower accepted quality may change what is acceptable over time for internet facing software. Even that is seemingly a long way off, look at the actual consequences for recent privacy and security breaches.

[yarper]

The problem with this is that badly written software actually costs more to write than a properly engineered product.

Sure, the initial impulse is cheaper if you hire all greenhorns but after a year? after five years? When the business decides that they want to move from AWS to Azure for X immutable reason?

[analognoise]

If technical debt becomes outward facing, the market punishes those involved. As long as technical debt is something engineers complain about but can keep putting the fires out on, then it does make business sense (after a fashion) - a wiser or more apt management might arguably do better, but if it isn't sufficient to make a company uncompetitive then it can at least be argued to be a worthwhile strategy, especially if you get smart young people for cheap who are willing to work brutal hours and then you just replace them when as they wise up and burn/age out.

[yarper]

All sectors or organisations being "disrupted" have become slow moving or invested in the status quo. No quicker way to get slow moving than have huge amounts of tech debt.