Comment by bluefirebrand

1 day ago

Businesses need to learn that, like it or not, code quality and architecture quality is a part of product quality

You can have a super great product that makes a ton of money right now that has such poor build quality that you become too calcified to improve in a reasonable amount of time

This is why startups can outcompete incumbents sometimes

Suddenly there's a market shift and a startup can actually build your entire product and the new competitive edge in less time than it takes you to add just the new competitive edge, because your code and architecture has atrophied to the point it takes longer to update it than it would to rebuild from scratch

Maybe this isn't as common as I think, I don't know. But I am pretty sure it does happen

>You can have a super great product that makes a ton of money right now that has such poor build quality that you become too calcified to improve in a reasonable amount of time

While it's true that that can be partially due to tech debt, there are generally other factors as well. The more years you've had to accrue customers in various domains, the more years of decisions you have to maintain backwards compatibility with, the more regulatory regimes you conduct business under and build process around, the slower you're going to move compared to someone trying to move fast and break things.