[mst]

Something I often explain to customers (shadow.cat is a consultancy so we usually don't arrive until several years into a company's life) is that, yes, they've accumulated a shitload of technical debt, and yes, I get they're embarassed about it, but if you don't cut some corners in the early days your competitors who do will drive you out of business before it ever matters.

Then I politely point out to them that they're still in business, and their codebase is doing something sufficiently useful to customers that it's making enough money to be able to support a budget for us to help, so clearly they did something right and I'm not going to hold against them the choices without which they'd've never become a customer anyway.

(anybody doing similar work please feel free to steal my spiel, it's so nice to get the in-house developers to realise they're not going to be judged because it makes it much easier to get on with the part where you work with them to unfuck the codebase :)