“Clean Code” Is Killing Startups (and No One Wants to Admit It)
TDD is useless if you don't live long enough to run the tests.
Let’s get this out of the way:
Clean code is great. TDD is great. TypeScript is great.
But none of that matters if your startup is dead.
I know — it goes against everything you were taught in computer science.. Every software engineering blog screams about the “importance of best practices.”
But early-stage startups live in a completely different universe — one where the most dangerous bug is running out of money.
🧠 The Harsh Reality of Startup Engineering
Startups don’t fail because they used var instead of const.
They fail because they built the wrong thing too slowly.
Every hour you spend polishing your CI/CD pipeline or refactoring a component is an hour your users don’t see value.
And when users don’t see value, investors don’t see traction.
And when investors don’t see traction… you’re done.
In a corporation, your job is to keep the machine running smoothly.
In a startup, your job is to find a machine that actually works.
That difference changes everything.
⚙️ The Illusion of “Long-Term Thinking”
Developers love to say,
“If we invest in clean code now, it’ll save us time later.”
True — if you survive long enough to reach “later.”
But early-stage startups are not optimizing for longevity; they’re optimizing for learning speed.
You’re not building a skyscraper — you’re building a raft while sailing through a storm.
Yes, you’ll rewrite it all later. That’s fine.
Because “later” only matters if you make it there.
⚖️ Finding the Balance
Of course, chaos has a cost.
When you move too fast, your tech debt compounds.
The product slows down, onboarding new engineers becomes painful, and bugs eat your sanity.
But “move fast and break things” doesn’t mean “move blind and burn everything.”
The real skill of a founding engineer is knowing how dirty is too dirty.
Write code that can survive a pivot, but not necessarily a decade.
Automate only what slows you down twice.
Document only what another person really needs to understand.
🚀 The Startup Engineer’s Job Description
Being a founding engineer means accepting imperfection as a feature, not a flaw.
You build things that might get deleted next month.
You balance hacky experiments with scalable foundations.
You prioritize momentum over methodology.
You are not coding for textbooks — you’re coding for survival.
✌️ Final Thought
TDD, TypeScript, CI/CD — all amazing tools.
But tools only matter if you live long enough to use them properly.
Startups don’t die from messy code.
They die from beautiful code that nobody needs.
Happy Friday — and no offence. ✌️