I've seen projects that failed, or were killed, likely at least in part due to a culture that encouraged poor quality and tech debt. This is preventable, and for no additional up-front engineering effort or time investment.
I think this is the most common failure mode I’ve seen, short of a failure to find a proper product-market fit.
It’s just really hard to overstate how much damage a bunch of crappy code can have. Even with the best of intentions. I must say I strongly disagree that this is “never a problem”.
One of my managers was fond of the phrase, “a project is done when nobody is willing to work on it anymore.” That can be because of a number of reasons, including that the money is gone, or it sucks your will to live.
Yes, parent says "people leave" as if it is not a problem in itself; you lose the time it takes to train these people, and they probably take some knowledge about the products with them. Or maybe we are actually talking about commodity developers?
But I'm curious about how one prevents this dysfunctional culture.
At my last job the people motivated to fix the clusterfuck were the first to leave. Except me because I’m a masochist apparently.
We’re talking about different scales.
At a big company “you” don’t lose anything. You only lose if you’re a fool trying to fix dysfunctional culture when you’re not even close to C level.
You said that right! Absolutely. It's one thing to fix a mess in a culture that cares. It's darn near impossible to fix it if the culture around is hostile, indifferent, or any of the other 82 million other reasons organizations come up with to not care. In that situation you can end up being the pariah despite good intentions engineering and otherwise like satisfied customers.
I've been doing this for decades, it's never a problem. Either velocity tanks in which case there's a short period where company invests into improving it, or people leave.