And in my experience it isn't true that nobody in leadership appreciates this. I think it's easy to make the case that it is worth investing today to make it less burdensome for a team in the future, which may or may not contain the current team members, to evolve the software being written in the moment. This makes sense to everyone in a business, because the same is true of any business process.
"Clean code" is not the only way to accomplish this; processes and documentation are other things you can do. But I also think it's easy to make the case that writing comprehensible code actually has the best lifetime return on investment. It isn't hard to do - indeed, it's often easier to ship working features with well-structured code, and it requires less future toil than documenting a process that requires working around poorly structured code.
But of course often times there is a tipping point where further tinkering with making code "clean" is no longer net positive. But I think codenames that tend toward I dunno, maybe 95% cleanliness provide good value to an organization.
And in my experience it isn't true that nobody in leadership appreciates this. I think it's easy to make the case that it is worth investing today to make it less burdensome for a team in the future, which may or may not contain the current team members, to evolve the software being written in the moment. This makes sense to everyone in a business, because the same is true of any business process.
"Clean code" is not the only way to accomplish this; processes and documentation are other things you can do. But I also think it's easy to make the case that writing comprehensible code actually has the best lifetime return on investment. It isn't hard to do - indeed, it's often easier to ship working features with well-structured code, and it requires less future toil than documenting a process that requires working around poorly structured code.
But of course often times there is a tipping point where further tinkering with making code "clean" is no longer net positive. But I think codenames that tend toward I dunno, maybe 95% cleanliness provide good value to an organization.