I would bet on the team who has the best marketing plan and support package because quality at point of sale is rarely the differentiator in a company's success.
I think that usually in these discussions, the money saved (the 20%) is intended to be used on other things than development.
It's a pipe dream. The "saved" money is eaten by fixing the crappy code written at 4 AM, three months into crunch mode. Only works if you can bully the developers into unpaid overtime.
You can't ship a product that isn't finished, and programmers with unfinished projects can't start new ones.
Let other programmers fix the bugs and charge it to support after you release it. Send your main programmers onto the next project. That's how commercial software works.
> Let other programmers fix the bugs and charge it to support after you release it. Send your main programmers onto the next project. That's how commercial software works.
That's how some commercial software works, but less and less. It's a dying model.
That strategy represents two bets: 1) You can shift a lot of the costs from before release to after (in the form of tech debt), and 2) people will pay you a lot up front before they figure out that your product is buggy and that you can't innovate any more.
That could work with packaged software where you can market the hell out of it and get a lot of people to buy it once. It doesn't make sense for internal software, though. And it mostly doesn't make economic sense for software as a service, where people pay you month by month. With a service, it's better to start small with a core market and then innovate continuously, so people always feel like it's getting better. You can't do effective continuous innovation with high levels of technical debt and your "main programmers" off on the next project. Unless your market has a very high barrier to entry, somebody will spot your weakness, jump in as a competitor, and quickly lap you.
We'll still be dealing with the bad habits from that era for years. But the era itself is over.
Like, not here. Instead we hire contractors from some big contracting agency who pay them nothing and charge us $120/hr, then they proceed to destroy whatever quality was there in the beginning. Eventually it becomes such a shit show that we have to start over again, this time with double the contractors since we're given an impossible schedule to replace it.
Oh, the joys of US salary-exempt work. They did bump up the ceiling on the maximum income that can be compensated for overtime, but in practice it is still below the level of most salaried positions.
I think that usually in these discussions, the money saved (the 20%) is intended to be used on other things than development.