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At my last company we had a co-founder like this. He would implement stuff extremely quickly, often at odd hours to fix a pressing bug. However, the code was just garbage from a maintenance standpoint.

It was hard to criticize, though, because he pretty much single-handedly got the company off the ground by quickly implementing features people were willing to pay for. This code was good enough to get the company up to $2 million annually.

The downside is we spent about a year re-writing the software to get it to a state where the company could scale to higher levels. During that year we had to stop adding new features.

I remember getting very frustrated with the code quality, but I often wondered whether that was just a price we had to pay to get cash flow positive.




Yeap, that was the price. It's called technical debt and sometimes it makes sense to have it.

Dirty code not always has to be refactored. Most of dirty code just dies together with useless functionality (wrong guess on business side).




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