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by muad_kyrlach
1899 days ago
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Tech debt is deferred value, the cost of which tends to exponentially increase. "We could have feature/efficiency of <some high number> if we spent <high time/people/money cost>. That cost is too high right now -- we have a deadline, we have been given a specific budget, etc -- so we will settle for less value since we believe it to be more affordable. Doing this will likely only make the cost of what we are deferring even higher, but it's the best decision we can justify at the moment." Tech Debt is a rational tradeoff, but when all decision makers are incentivized to only care about the short term, then it quickly becomes an unassailable barrier to future growth. |
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In theory you are right, tech debt is a tradeoff.
In practice what is happening is that people decide not to pay attention to design at all and just throw away every single "best practice" with the excuse that there is a short deadline.
Many cases, this short deadline is entirely illusory, especially in large corporations. Many times I just ignored the deadline on my own judgement and everything came out fine and everybody was happy.
Most of the time, in a crunch, you can still follow most of the good practice and identify only small number of things that are just too time-consuming to handle now. You can then plan so that it is easier to fix later.
For example: when in crunch, I tend to focus on overall design and APIs and try to concentrate the tech debt in implementation. It is usually much easier to fix individual modules when they have good APIs and interactions with other systems. Fixing bad design/architecture spanning multiple systems is much bigger issue and usually requires touching implementation anyway.
But that's not what usually happens -- I haven't noticed people actually planning technical debt.
Another issue with technical debt is that there isn't anybody to chase you to pay it off. At least with an actual loan there is a bank that chases you. This aspect is underappreciated -- I personally think it should cause us to err on the side of less tech debt.