Does Clean Code Have Business Benefits?

"Managers and business owners don't care about best coding practices"

That was, paraphrased, an observation from a reader in response to yesterday's post about vibe code cleanup specialists.

And to some extent, that is true. It's hard getting those downstream of software engineering to care about arcane details of Domain-Driven Design, Acceptance-Test-Driven Design, or any of the other ways to drive design, let alone deep-in-the-weeds things like refactoring and observability.

If you want to advocate for any of these, either internally as an employee or externally as an expert consultant, you have to translate these practices into what they mean for the business, in as visceral terms as possible:

• "You know how it always takes us hours of manual debugging to find and fix critical issues that make our users switch to competing products? It's because the code isn't properly instrumented. We can set up a basic observability system and likely cut our time to find and fix issues down to an hour."

Even a boss who couldn't care less about observability, or how long the on-call developers need to find and fix a bug, would care a lot about customer churn.

If you want to advocate for your craft, hit 'em where it hurts.