[ianbutler]

Oh sure, I didn't mean to suggest code quality can't kill a business. I however think like you said it's very domain dependent on how quickly that happens. I think taking on no debt wrt to code quality is impossible though and knowing how to take on that debt and pay it down to effectively meet the broader business goals without doing irreparable harm is something everyone has to contend with while being a dev.

That said, I can really only speak to web api dev, data engineering and search. I'd say out of all of those search was the tightest area with regards to quality and even then I was lucky to be working with another very talented dev. Him and I didn't run into very many issues we were unable to solve with scaling the technology even after hitting 100m pages or so and we could have kept going on scale but we were cost constrained, navigating the business side was far more challenging for us.

I'll admit as well I've been pretty lucky so far to work in situations where code quality is considered and managed and haven't yet worked somewhere where the concerns were entirely ignored or the team didn't care.