[LinuxBender]

I wish I could upvote this a few times. I have created so many "just use this for now" solutions that have been in use for more than a decade. The real problem never gets fixed for exactly the reason you stated. "It's working, I don't see a problem" (says the manager) and priorities go to other more burning issues. The debt adds up to thousands of small cuts and and ultimately the sum of the debt becomes very expensive to maintain in terms of hours updating, debugging, getting someone who knows the history, finding old jira issues, etc... I think can-kicking eventually contributes to burn-out.

[buran77]

> "It's working, I don't see a problem" (says the manager) and priorities go to other more burning issues.

Well you know the old saying, save the grease for the squeaky wheels. When you face a major hurdle sometimes the best course of action is to take a shortcut just to avoid it and fix it later when you can properly allocate resource for a solid fix. But most times after the fix it's hard to justify fixing it "again".

I've had managers who said "I understand the issue but we have a budget and more critical cracks to fix", and I've had managers who said "what are you going on about, looks good to me". Result is the same but the potential of each attitude is vastly different. The first kind of manager knows when "that" crack becomes a priority. The second kind of manager is unaware there's a crack.

[LeonM]

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

[mark-r]

When I went to the University of Minnesota in the late '70's, there were "temporary" buildings installed just after WWII that were still in use.

[bilekas]

I'm taking this with me.

[kokey]

That's not a problem since you're just going to quickly be rewriting it all using this new language, framework, development methodology, deployment mechanism and infrastructure technology that solves all the old problems so surely it'll fix these problems too.