However, few companies are rated on the quality of their code. Rather, most companies are rated on how well they serve their customers needs, including the vast majority of companies discussed on Hacker News.

The way to delight your customers is to iterate quickly. The way to achieve great software is also to iterate quickly. That is not a coincidence. Willingness to withstand a little bit of breakage allows companies to move fast. This contributes to an overall _higher_ level of quality, leading not to frequent outages (Facebook does not have frequent outages and failure), but to more robust product.

I am aware of how people build software in more traditional fields (my background is in compilers and static analysis). I am also aware that traditional software development techniques are being eclipsed by those who are willing to throw off the shackles of the past. The "hackday coding methodology" may not be useful to make the code for your car, but the techniques used to build your car are not useful for building a successful SaaS product.