[RangerScience]

IME, “young” correlates with health b/c less time has been spent making it a mess… but, what’s really going on is the company’s culture and how it relates to quality work, aka, whether engineers are given the time to perform deep maintenance as the iteration concludes.

Maybe… to put it another way, it’s that time spent on quality isn’t time spent on discovery, but it’s only time spent on quality that gets you quality. So while a company is heavily focused on discovery - iteration, p/m fit, engineers figuring it out, etc - it’s not making a good codebase, and if they never carve out time to focus on quality, that won’t change.

That’s not entirely true - IMO, there’s a synergistic, not exclusionary relationship between the two - but it gets the idea across, I think.