> I’ve never once heard the CEO care about our code quality. The only thing that matters is if we can deliver before deadlines or not. Nobody’s getting promoted for clean code if the feature ships late.

This is right, but IMO the author of the article draws the wrong conclusions from it.

If you write shitty code, eventually you won't be able to deliver. So the CEO will be pissed because results won't follow. The thing is that usually, the CEO has no clue what "maintainable code" means. The CEO cares about meeting deadlines, assuming that the developers do their job.

Let me put it this way:

CEOs usually don't say "write unreadable code, I don't care, I want it as fast as possible". Obviously they want it as fast as possible, but they don't want you to lose your time writing code that will be unusable before it has paid for your salary.

It's the developer's job to write maintainable code. Not "perfect" code, but "maintainable". Anything lower than "maintainable" is downright malpractice. It's the developer's job to make that understood by management. And if management still insists on writing unmaintainable code... start looking for a new job. But also it's a skill that developers need to learn. Junior devs won't necessarily know the boundaries between "unmaintainable", "maintainable" and "over-engineered".