If you're an enterprise (including startups), you worry about customers, not code quality. There are famously many startups that gained traction despite shit code and then eventually got around to fixing it, to whatever extent was possible, like Facebook HHVM, Stripe's Sorbet, etc.
Startups failed because they cound not untangle own code after 4 months. Literally true stories (plural).
> Startups failed because they cound not untangle own code after 4 months.
That's rare, though. If they could not untangle their own code after 4 months, it's because they were not making enough money to pay a team to untangle it - that's not a code problem, it's a revenue problem.
IOW, the startup failed because their revenue was too low.
There are orders of magnitude that failed because they did not solve the right customer problem. Code quality is merely incidental the vast majority of the time.
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