I agree with most of this. However in my time I've never seen a company that was a., successful and b., prioritizing tech debt/upkeep at the same time. I presume AI will fix this however maybe not since it's so tempting to defer strategic decisions to it.

I have seen tech companies flourish which had tech, or tech-adjacent leadership. I've never seen a really good tech company that was lead by an MBA, a "vibe bro", or someone looking to get rich quick. It almost always comes from a genuine passion to solve problems in a certain domain.

One key point is also hires, hiring slowly and not keeping bad hires around. Bad hires really pull everyone down and it's really difficult to work around bad coworkers.

I personally actively filter out companies who don't use Slack. The way communication is done in a company reflects practically every company decision. (Conway's Law)

> I personally actively filter out companies who don't use Slack. The way communication is done in a company reflects practically every company decision. (Conway's Law)

Do you actually mean "don't use Slack" or actually just "use Teams"? If the former, I don't think that makes a lot of sense unless you own a lot of Salesforce stock. There's a number of Slack alternatives that pretty much deliver the same experience.

> I've never seen a company that was a., successful and b., prioritizing tech debt/upkeep at the same time.

Maybe you have only worked in start ups? I have certainly seen products fail or partially fail because of tech debt. One product was extremely unproductive to work on because of a patched together architecture. To the extent that bugs were introduced easily but took so long to turn around that customers left the product and told us that was the reason.