[ford]

At the end of the day writing good code is rarely the "end" someone is shooting for. It's more research, more features, more experimentation, etc. Maybe hobby projects and library maintainers are the exceptions.

In my experience, big companies have the biggest incentive to write good code. They have the highest conviction in their bets, and they know with high confidence they will be around in 10 years. One large tech company I worked at had a rule of thumb that all code would need to be maintained for ~7 years - at which point, as the author points out, the entire team may have been replaced. This is precisely when the time it takes to write good code is a worthy investment