To your point though, I can see a strategic path of "crappy until we get enough funding and users that we can go back and redo it".

In practice though, most companies never seem to polish a shipped feature -- they instead focus on adding more mediocre features.

I would love to see this trend reversed of course! But software in our age seems doomed to short lifespans and mediocre quality.

That actually proves my point. The original founder sold to News Corp just as Facebook was taking over in 2009. The strategy was a success depending on where you stand....

Our difference of opinion hinges on the ambiguity of “success”. Here you use “success” strictly in the sense of making a financial gain, while MySpace’s users would have called it a failure.

Isn’t that the metric that all investor funded startups use - either being acquired or going public at some multiple of their original investment?

Unless I’m working at a job where I’m serving some greater good, my definition of success is did I help achieve the company’s objectives, get paid well, and will I be able to use my coworkers and management as references in the future.

Your position is that financial gain is the only metric that matters and that the quality or longevity of the product is irrelevant, and my position is that that's a concise summary of everything that's wrong with "tech". We agree to disagree.

How much code that is run by most user facing businesses Is the same code that was used 10 years ago no matter how good it is?

No matter how great my Perl code was running 15 years and 5 companies ago, I doubt they are still using it.

The code that runs Amazon.com, Google.com, etc. is nothing like what they ran 10 years ago.

Besides, we aren’t talking about feeding starving children here. We are talking about the death of a social media platform. But more generically, if yet another software as a service CRUD app dies, whose hurt besides the investors who expect most of their startups to fail and the developers who can walk down the street and get another job in a week?

As an individual, why am I going to fight the loosing battle of trying to implement great code quality and test coverage when I’m being incentivized by how many features my team can pump out as cheaply as possible by hiring a bunch of poorly paid developers overseas?

We call what we do “engineering” but there is a world of difference. If my program fails that is running a SAAS app, the user gets a 500 error. If a mechanical engineer rushes, people die.