New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to prioritise codebase health/design over new features in a startup?

Ask HN: How to prioritise codebase health/design over new features in a startup?
2 by achie27 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I work in a startup that is in the scaling-up zone and every now and then there's some adhoc feature request or unforeseen circumstance that forces me to tweak my codebase in a way I don't want to - like putting a 'temporary' hotfix and just injecting a new logic without creating a separate/proper pipeline for it. There is no systematic testing flow or code coverage either. Its almost too sad that this service hasn't had its share of cleanup given its importance. Now, I am at the bottom of the barrel here and not the original creator of the repo. It is a clusterfuck tbh and I really want to refactor it. The thing is, this repo connects to almost everything else in the ecosystem and taking the time out to refactor it is not going to bode well for a number of interdependent features. How did you guys proceed when your microservice was getting out of hand with all the new features? And what do you guys prioritise, as a SWE, the health of your service or new (and apparently important) features floated by the product team?