Ask HN: When selling a software business, does code quality affect sale price? - ezekg
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segmondy
99% of the time. Nope, having tons of paying customers and profit is what will
matter. If the "shitty code" was good enough to build that business, it will
be a good enough to keep it running. I have seen companies acquired for tens
of millions and 2 hundred million offers and the code was pure shit. It was
the customers/business that was important. Guess what, those acquisitions were
successful and the buyer is happy! The acquiring development team wasn't happy
of course and won't have signed off on buying because of the code base, but
that's why they are engineering and not M&A!

Thought experiment, imagine you build a social network that grows to be as
large as twitter or Instagram, or you come up with an amazing deep learning
tech that is far ahead of anything in the industry. Do you think all the
companies that will come knocking at your door will care about the code
quality? In the former case, if you have 100 million DAU, folks want the users
not the code. In the later, if you have amazing tech, no one cares about the
code quality, they want the tech, they can hire pros to fix and improve the
quality.

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tmm84
This answer is spot on. User base is always more important than code base. ROI
is what business people care about and code quality doesn't matter as much as
does it work as advertised. Also there are always those coders who'd work on
building a 2.0 for said project at a decent rate because they need the
paycheck.

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PaulHoule
Good Q.

It has to do with the buyer's ability to determine what the code quality is. I
think people are limited in their ability to quickly assess code quality.
Myself, I spent two days reviewing a system to give it a clean bill of health,
but six months later my boss said that it shouldn't have been written at all
and I agreed.

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evolve2k
I’m just thinking now, turning on a tool like code climate [0] could be useful
as it scans the whole codebase and gives each part of the code a grade (eg.
A,B,C).

Not a perfect approach but a useful guide to find obvious code smells/issues.

[0] [https://codeclimate.com/](https://codeclimate.com/)

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throwaway13000
Yes. It does affect. If I, the buyer, determine that your code needs to
signifcantly rewritten to fit my needs/systems, I will be willing to pay less
money. Instead, I may want to build it myself.

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LiamPa
There is a good chapter in Chaos Monkeys regarding this and facebooks review
of the code.

