[routerl]

Weird post. The main insight is easily captured by the phrase "technical debt is a resource, not a vice".

It also disregards that developers who care about clean code do exist, such that the title becomes merely metaphorical, and is more accurately rendered as "users don't care about clean code".

Except that they do, they just don't know it. Time to new features and time to bug fixes (both of which users do care about (though, of course, not unanimously)) is inversely proportional to how easy a codebase is to navigate and understand (read: how clean it is).

Finally, all software developers (or all workers?) prefer their work to have a high ratio of accomplishment to drudgery. The primary benefit of clean code is developer quality of life, as indicated by the nascent field of DX (Developer Experience).

[dosethree]

Technical debt not only makes it harder to add features, it makes it harder to remove technical debt and make technical improvements. Choosing not to pay down technical debt is fine, but at some point it will be such a mess you won't be able add features or fix the technical debt issues without a total rewrite scale project.

[hinkley]

Money is a resource too, but rock stars tend to turn it into a vice.