Comment by holtkam2

Great piece, but it misses the elephant in the room: the lion's share of economic benefit from refactoring will come from the fact that it makes it easier for humans to understand. That means 3am pages get resolved faster, fewer bugs will end up in prod, and your team can ship faster than your competition - gaining a leg up in the market. Most importantly, folks will be more comfortable accepting responsibility and ownership of a system when they understand it... this means that if/when something goes wrong, people will more quickly jump in and fix it, and when things could be better, folks will jump in and improve it.