[glmeece]

A tale of two companies (true story)...

I worked for a company a full year that always prioritized new features over bug fixes, or even QA. This was a sales-driven company. For various reasons, it was a toxic environment and I left.

The next company I worked for prioritized good engineering over shipping a product. This was an engineering-oriented company. It's funding was running low ('cause - well, no product!) and I got caught up in a layoff.

Company #1 - for 5 months of that year, I was the only QA person (with 13 devs). Literally no time to automate regression - there was always the "next feature we need to close a sale to customer 'X'". I told my boss that inevitably I (or my occasional comrades) would miss something and the company would be liable. Sure enough, within 18 months of my exit, they were hit with 3 different lawsuits.

Company #2 - absolutely delightful environment, except for the non-technical CEO. Understandably, he wanted to return value to the investors, but he kept making short-term decisions about direction that, while intending to make money, ended up accelerating the cash burn. I was promoted to be a technical lead of about 8 people on a side-project that was supposed to leverage technology from a company whose name is a homophone of 1 × 10¹⁰⁰. No surprise, mega-company changed the rules and our potential product was DOA. The entire team (including me) was let go.

TL;DR - quality is engineered in, and everyone owns quality. If a genuine defect exists, determine its severity and likelihood of emergence with customers to determine priority. Don't ship/push to production any code that will cause customers to lose data or their ability to run their businesses. If you have to make a choice, choose bug fixes over new features.