[martin_ky]

I think, this goes way beyond just companies preferring to hire cheaper developers and beyond software engineering as such. There is a larger, universal force at play here. Examples of poorly designed, engineered and built things are everywhere in the world. It is seemingly cheaper to do it this way. But what may be saved upfront on production quality, is usually spent many times over on usage, maintenance and subsequent rebuilding, making the total cost higher.

For example, a road built with cheaper materials will break and need to be patched more often. A poorly engineered application will be slower, consume more CPU power, more data bandwidth and require more storage space, will be buggier and waste more users' time.

With only a very basic understanding of economic theory, I would imagine that market forces at scale would optimize these inefficiencies and ultimately work to reduce total costs. Perhaps this unconscious, natural process would even work, were we not consciously optimizing against it on the wrong variables, such as the next quarter's profits.