[stouset]

It’s also littered with the bodies of companies that failed to keep up with their early initial development speed because their development team cranked out two years’ worth of “whatever works” and walled themselves into a corner.

In my experience, that happens way more often than teams failing to produce value because they’ve spent eons polishing something to perfection.

On the other hand, our industry’s culture of not taking the time for anything to be built a little better means we have an enormous number of seemingly-experienced engineers who lack the understanding of how to write well-built software even if they are given the time. Which leads to individuals concluding that time spent cleaning things up is a waste because they end up with something worse and more complicated afterward. So they don’t invest in learning this skill, and the cycle repeats.