Comment by jack_h

Code maintainability could be analogized to 5S in the manufacturing world. As a hypothetical let's say someone started assembling some product on the bare concrete warehouse floor because they had a pressing order to fill. A few months later it's just a mess of parts strewn about the floor that workers have to sift through to find the correct pieces for the assembly. The goal of a business is to make money, not have a clean workspace as a sibling comment mentioned. Ultimately this would leave a company vulnerable to a competitor who doesn't have such an expensive and inefficient production process though.

I've worked on many, many features that never recouped their engineering cost despite the absolute assurance by sales that it was necessary. It would have been more effective long term to work on improving code maintainability so that we could better capitalize on features that substantially affect revenue in a positive direction. All too often I see that code maintainability only matters to the business when features can no longer be reliably and quickly delivered, but by then it's usually too late to really change course. This sort of balance also tends to drive all of the new fancy frameworks that cause so much churn as the signal from the business to engineering is that engineering needs to be able to pump out features very quickly but will not be given time to focus on maintainability so naturally this gets outsourced to someone else.

To be fair, I have also been involved in an emergency project that if it wasn't completed in a very tight time frame the company would have lost 30% of their revenue and there would have been substantial workforce reductions. We did not focus on maintainability in this situation rather we focused on saving the company.

Everything is a trade-off in business. My experience tells me companies generally focus on short term profit over long term concerns and there's very little in the way of feedback mechanisms that allow an inspection of these decisions in aggregate to see if the right balance is being struck.