Had a startup fail because we tried to do the right thing instead of "Fuck it, ship it". Worked at another place where the codebase finally curled up into a ball and refused to accept any refactorings short of a complete rewrite of some core systems--at which point we discovered some nasty bugs in production that we punted to our support folks to deal with. I've no idea if they ever eventually sorted it out.
Good engineers will recognize when it's "good enough". However, that requires biz folks that can provide useful feedback and actually get things in front of customers and get paid. Because, honestly, if we're like three extra features in, have no validation, and are cutting corners, you're damned right I'm going to put on the brakes and redirect the effort toward paying off technical debt.
Because, and this can't be overstated enough, whether or not the business fails in six months is not something we engineers can control--but I'll be damned if I'm going to come in and keep sinking my dwindling life force on a fucking technical lemon. If your biz folks can't establish trust in their abilities, then you might as well hone your craft.
EDIT:
Large amounts of technical debt are a sign of either rapid growth or bad management. If the company is growing, we can overlook the debt every time we, say, waste 30 minutes waiting on a build or fixing a weird nested CSS bug or some other damn fool thing. If the company isn't, then we lose respect for everyone above us in the technical leadership, because they let--by deliberate neglect!--the situation get so bad.
Good engineers will recognize when it's "good enough". However, that requires biz folks that can provide useful feedback and actually get things in front of customers and get paid. Because, honestly, if we're like three extra features in, have no validation, and are cutting corners, you're damned right I'm going to put on the brakes and redirect the effort toward paying off technical debt.
Because, and this can't be overstated enough, whether or not the business fails in six months is not something we engineers can control--but I'll be damned if I'm going to come in and keep sinking my dwindling life force on a fucking technical lemon. If your biz folks can't establish trust in their abilities, then you might as well hone your craft.
EDIT:
Large amounts of technical debt are a sign of either rapid growth or bad management. If the company is growing, we can overlook the debt every time we, say, waste 30 minutes waiting on a build or fixing a weird nested CSS bug or some other damn fool thing. If the company isn't, then we lose respect for everyone above us in the technical leadership, because they let--by deliberate neglect!--the situation get so bad.