[badcodehere]

> Would anyone advertise a company that doesn't have a "High Quality Codebase"?

I don't know about advertising (and this is a throwaway account) but when we interview candidates, we're clear that our code base has a lot of legacy code and the quality is a mixed bag. We're also clear that while most of our development team wants to improve it, it's a slow process and can only be done in ways that don't slow down feature development.

Developers who are obsessed with code quality have been a mixed bag for us. Several of our best developers are the people who care the most about quality code and push hardest to improve it. On the other hand, we've had people who seem to care a lot about quality, but have no feel for the cost/benefit ratio of any given change, and spend more time complaining about code than actually working on it. The ability to talk about what good code looks like doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to improve flawed code.

[john117-theline]

You have technical debt. It, by definition, slows down feature development by its very existence. But only of code that touches it in some manner.

I understand the imporantance of balancing business needs with 'clean code' but I think you're setting yourself up for unexpected costs with the mindset that code can only be cleaned up if features can still be delivered at the same speed. Are you doing it by fixing in the natural lulls in development? Hiring more people? Or perhaps by going beyond a 9-5?