This is true... but it's also true of ≈everything else in the organization. An organization that could be broken by any single thing would not survive for long! This includes the things people tediously insist to be "more important" than software quality. It certainly includes the usual suspects that push people to cut software corners: companies don't break by missing OKRs or slipping schedules or not "focusing" or any other management pablum any more than they break due to software quality.
But, of course, all of those can contribute to a company failing—including bugs, slow delivery and poor quality code. The dynamics and the extent to which different factors matter is inherently context-specific.
Companies can fail despite doing the right thing and succeed despite doing the wrong thing. This doesn't make the wrong thing effective or reasonable, it just means we're operating in the domain of complex, stochastic systems, so our simple mental models of cause and effect become misleading.
The fact that low-quality software doesn't directly cause a company to fail does not imply that investing in software quality is not right. I am firmly convinced that maintaining high quality software will have better outcomes in expectation than cutting corners pretty much universally, if only because it simply doesn't cost much—it's a matter of setting the right culture more than anything else.
There are interesting observations to be made here. Variations on "software quality doesn't matter because it won't destroy the company" are not it.
This is true... but it's also true of ≈everything else in the organization. An organization that could be broken by any single thing would not survive for long! This includes the things people tediously insist to be "more important" than software quality. It certainly includes the usual suspects that push people to cut software corners: companies don't break by missing OKRs or slipping schedules or not "focusing" or any other management pablum any more than they break due to software quality.
But, of course, all of those can contribute to a company failing—including bugs, slow delivery and poor quality code. The dynamics and the extent to which different factors matter is inherently context-specific.
Companies can fail despite doing the right thing and succeed despite doing the wrong thing. This doesn't make the wrong thing effective or reasonable, it just means we're operating in the domain of complex, stochastic systems, so our simple mental models of cause and effect become misleading.
The fact that low-quality software doesn't directly cause a company to fail does not imply that investing in software quality is not right. I am firmly convinced that maintaining high quality software will have better outcomes in expectation than cutting corners pretty much universally, if only because it simply doesn't cost much—it's a matter of setting the right culture more than anything else.
There are interesting observations to be made here. Variations on "software quality doesn't matter because it won't destroy the company" are not it.