ZIRP's Legacy: Why Quality Gatekeepers Thrived in the Era of Cheap Capital

The 'just-say-no engineer'—focused on code quality, complexity reduction, and blocking risky changes—was economically sensible during ZIRP (2008-2022), when cheap capital allowed tech companies to grow rapidly without needing high productivity per engineer. Now, with rising interest rates and pressure from AI-generated code, these quality gatekeepers face a reckoning: their conservative approach may no longer align with business economics. This shift reveals that engineering culture has been shaped as much by macroeconomic cycles as by technical principles.