[s188]

Perhaps it's the fact that you tolerated the technical debt that got you to google scale. I've seen a few projects where developers aim for (as swatcoder so eloquently put it above) the intellectual purity of clean systems and then watch these projects fail to be delivered.

We'd all like to be a filthy rich pragmatist but I wonder just how much the 'low-quality standards' enabled you to achieve that. Seriously, I would love to be a millionaire with regrets about low quality code instead of being broke with junior developers pointing out my code smells and technical debt.

[ukj]

Perhaps, but you can't determine whether a system is over or under-engineered a priori. Certainly not when you are racing a clock.

These kind of assertions are always after the fact. And in hind-sight I think we could've done a tad better.

I might be less-rich, but that's not even close to being broke. And the people I hire to clean up my technical debt would hate working here less.