[AllegedAlec]

> working code is better than no code. As you get better and come back to it, your working code will eventually be clean code

That only works under the assumption that you have time to come back to it. I've also seen cases where you just get 15 years of cruft, good intentions and bad implementations, at which point people never want to touch it again, because the last time they did they accidentaly broke a client's system.

[uCantCauseUCant]

I noticed the warning sign for such accumulated crust and culture, is usually a exponential dev team growth curve. We just need 4 new devs this year and 8 new devs next year. All that while the actual product is at linear growth. Yes, it works, but its foreseeable that it will end working in n-years were dev-team size and cost is bigger then the whole money the product earned.

[AllegedAlec]

A warning sign isn't actionable perse though. All of our developers know that we're heading for a disaster, be it in a decade or 2 years. But given that we're busy a 100% of the time implementing new features for existing customers or setting up our software for new ones. There's no time for us to start fixing this mess, and even if we did: that doesn't pay the bills.