Wow. This response showed me a big blind spot of my own, and how I could have been using the same language to talk about something completely different without clarifying a basic point in advance: I've written customer-facing software and in-house employee software for 20+ years. But almost all the code I've ever written has been for companies whose business is something other than software... and where I have worked for software companies has been in the early prototypes and beta phases where bugs were an embarrassment. I've never worked on retail software that had generational code debt - or even ones that had a dedicated sales team driving features and development. I have worked with people who were more interested in feature explosion than in nailing down existing issues... and assuming they're not the boss of the company, I consider it important to speak up about fixing issues before moving on. But that is, I realize, a completely different ballgame than working for a company that primarily sells software to end users.