Comment by techdmn

In my experience few things sap developer motivation quite the same way as being forced to support, but not allowed to fix(!), a low quality product. The business rationalization makes a certain sort of sense. If we burn, say, 4 hours a week manually cleaning up after bug X, but it would take 80 hours to fix it, maybe the return on investment doesn't compete well against other initiatives this quarter. But in my experience, it often sends a message that we don't care about our users or our products. That isn't something engineers can be proud of at the end of the day, and it makes it difficult to care about your work. This can obviously be overdone in the other direction as well, but I often find the analysis to be penny wise but pound foolish.