[lifeisstillgood]

This smells like a straw man argument. Most of us don't have pie in the sky ideals about perfect codebases. we have practical, hard won expectations of a work-person like codebase and we want to build to that standard - not some higher perfection ideal. And being prevented from having good engineering by "get it out the door no matter what" is frustrating because 99.9% of the time that leads to crap service, overruns, and more crap work on top.

the exceptions like say "move fast and break things" are ... exceptions not the rule. your company is not a facebook like special snowflake and using the snowflake argument to drive poor engineering decisions just makes you look silly.

one essay i remember from ages back on Joel On Software was him describing working at a Jewish / Israeli bakery. the bread oven was rusty and broken on the outside and looked like crap. but inside it was spotless stainless steel, because the bakers knew that the inside was what counted, and any money spent polishing up the outside of the oven was just waste.

that is an exeellent way to see the software / value argument - you have to know where the value comes from, and make that part fucking perfect. the rest can just be hung together with string.

Any disagreements on which part needs to be perfect is really a misalignment if understanding the business