Your code may be elegant, but mine works

I also have to question whether this is really good from a business perspective. "First mover advantage" really is overrated. Rather than cutting corners to launch your product a couple of days sooner, perhaps you should be focusing on the long term.

Granted, there are all kinds of caveats we can think of. For example, very early startups don't have the option to focus on the long term and just need to ship something. But even then, putting in a little bit of time up front to polish your code will greatly help your velocity for your next couple of features. You are planning on having more features past the first couple, right?

Yeah, and that's like a perfect definition for "ad hominem" argument.

Note that much of the attitude comes from a belief that what is good for the company is ultimately good for the engineer.

However, I'll suggest that's not always the case. Take for example one of the OA's reflections:

"Technical debt should be weighted against the actual ROI, because in many cases it is more cost effective to launch early. This way, though you may be accruing technical debt, you are also accruing revenue immediately, and you can reconcile the debt over time."

Unfortunately, dependant upon your company, that last part may never happen and if I were to frequently experience that at a company, well, you better believe I would rather quit and if I couldn't quit I still would rather put my foot down and pump the tech debt argument for all it's worth, otherwise, in the longer term, working there would be a living hell.

I know I'll get a lot of flak for this take, but all I can say is that while I've quit companies like that, I understand why some people couldn't do the same, and at that point it may require some tough love people management in effort to create a brighter future with a healthy work place.

I think this captures the central problem in our current software development state of affairs. Because as developers we are stuck with primitive tools that make doing even trivial stuff time consuming, we have been conditioned to view every piece of code we write as a "will be maintained forever" proposition. You don't generally see people using excel and worrying about the maintainability of their spreadsheets, because even sophisticated spreadsheets are trivial to create and so the default mentality is use and throwaway.

This is a problem we are trying to tackle at my startup, a web developer tool that you can use to quickly put out applications to support day-to-day operations without obsessing about whether you're going to need to build a spaceship out of your current requirement.