[kirstenbirgit]

It's not just clean code, it's also things like microservice migrations or complete rewrites (preferably in a trendy framework or language) that makes programmers think they finally have the solution to all their problems (not those of the business, mind you), so they spend a bunch of time infrastructuring themselves down a hole they'll never escape, and bring the company down with them because they're "doing the right thing" or "fighting tech debt" or "breaking up the monolith".

Programmers should not have the responsibility to decide these things on their own; it should come from the companys risk assessments and help with the goal of the company, not the goal of the programmers (which is to put neat things on their CV.)

This is spoken as a programmer, by the way.