There is a selfish balancing act as well. I've been in two jobs where I'd take on more and more technical debt to deliver new features quickly so we could capture marketshare. Eventually, the technical debt killed agility and project sponsors didnt understand why every little thing took three days to do instead of one.
This left me open to being ousted (e.g., the Product Manager "had a friend" who could surely do everything much faster.) Seems easy from the outside. They got rid of me, hired the friend, who both increased the team size and then re-built from scratch.
Selfishly, it would have been better to more steadily deliver features and balance speed with maintainability -- because sometimes higherups dont understand the tradeoff they are making.
This left me open to being ousted (e.g., the Product Manager "had a friend" who could surely do everything much faster.) Seems easy from the outside. They got rid of me, hired the friend, who both increased the team size and then re-built from scratch.
Selfishly, it would have been better to more steadily deliver features and balance speed with maintainability -- because sometimes higherups dont understand the tradeoff they are making.