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The great dirty secret of the software industry is that an awful lot of the work that is critical to sustainably build and maintain a software system/product/whatever only happens in the wild because one person with a little extra care and a little extra time decided "I'm not going to wait for this to get priority. I'm not going to wait for permission. I'm just going to do this because it should be done, and damn the consequences."
@cammerman The choice is to pay up front to write code properly or pay much more when it's too late, if the code survives that long. The companies I worked for understood this, but I know not every company does.
I wonder if the bad practice you describe is more prevalent in application software? If you are developing libraries and tooling, for example, poor quality really costs a lot when users hit problems and these need diagnosing and fixing.
Some very real factors that go into decisions to defer maintenance/quality work:
1) we'll have more money later, so we will better be able to afford it
2) we are hoping to sell the company before this needs to be done, and think that it will cost us more money to do, than not having done it will knock off the valuation
3) if I put my political capital on the table for this now, I won't have it to use later, whereas if I wait till it can't be denied, it won't cost me that
@underlap these are all fairly cynical takes that make me kind of nauseated, but they are real, and people do use these reasons.
@cammerman Yes, unfortunately.