> This is a false dichotomy, and there is plenty of research (and experience) that shows shipping higher quality software actually takes less time and money.

I believe you when the business knows exactly what it's building. In the context of the article and the comment I was responding to, building high quality software wouldn't have helped them early on, thats kinda the whole point of tech debt and the discussion here. Knowing when is the right time to start changing the engineering culture and how easy (or hard) it is to do that.

I want to believe this. Do you have any citations?

My experience would suggest shipping higher quality software is a lot cheaper in the long run, but has up-front costs that often times startups can't afford.

You can afford them if you don't have project managers or sales guys begging for their demoable results of new shiny thing and promising it to others too early and too often.

My companies first 5 hires were junior developers. This cost a fair packets (because there were 5 of them!) and led to pretty low quality software (because they were all junior and didn't know what they were doing).

They could have shipped higher quality software quicker by hiring 2 senior developers for similar cost.

Startups bias toward hiring some less experienced developers by their nature, so they don't always know how to build quickly and solidly. The up front cost is either learning skills of abstraction from scratch, or hiring people who have.

These points aren't as opposed as you're making them seem. Throughput is better with careful planning and good design is an investment that pays off later.

Slapping it together pays off today but at the cost of acquiring a debt that costs lower average velocity and lower agility until its repaid.

A lot of small businesses make the decision to take on debt to move quickly at the beginning because the most important thing is initial growth and proving that you can actually make money.