The term code quality is overloaded and not really worth discussing without defining exactly what we mean.

But yes many of those problems were caused by business decisions. But engineers are perfectly cable of creating those problems on their own. If an engineer doesn’t realize that the function they called buffers messages in memory because someone made a wrapper function around sendAsync() and called it send(), that’s a code quality issue not a business issue (except as in the broader sense where every problem is ultimately a business issue).

Or if an engineer writes a naive implementation of some algorithm and adds a spinner so that an operation takes 5s to finish when it could be instantaneous if they’d thought about the problem more.

I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff like that happens.

It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and implements something properly and then it gets into the hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The business then wants some much cheaper contractors to quickly make those changes without the original engineers involved. The result is a mess.

I’m not going to disagree with you there. A bad engineering culture is usually ultimately caused by other factors. Many times that is just hiring bad engineers though. Such that even if business got out of the way, the engineers still wouldn’t make a quality product.

I half agree, but the engineering culture tends to follow from the business culture being presented.

You can't trust any new hires if you have middle managers with no technical experience who only care about business concerns, execs who only care about money, and all your good devs have left the company because they are not allowed to change anything.

The blame game is a massive red flag for everyone actually worth a damn to leave. Complacency, intolerance of disagreement, hyperpragmatism and obsessive focus on measurable productivity, etc. all kill a business by a million papercuts. A business needs room to breathe and the time and desire to think in order to thrive.

If you want new engineers who do good work you have to recognize that existing problems have become intertwined with the way the business currently works. They cannot fix what they cannot discuss. They cannot create when their hands are forced to repeat the motions of the ones they're replacing. All the while, someone rotten in the middle is definitely benefitting from throwing people under the bus and picking up a paycheck.