
Ask HN: How did you convince the decision makers to pay the technical debt? - cshipley
I started to answer the other question about technical debt. Then I realized that this question was more interesting to me.<p>How did you frame the argument that convinced the non-technical decision makers that technical debt should be taken care of? Was the metaphor of &quot;technical debt&quot; a good way to frame the argument, or was the notion too ethereal?
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analogwzrd
I'm not sure that I've successfully convinced the decision maker, but I did
work on a project where everything was put on hold to take time to pay the
technical debt.

As a junior engineer, I was brought in to upgrade a test facility that was
undocumented. In the first design review, I said "I have documentation up to
_this_ point and after that we're guessing." A much more senior engineer, who
had been in charge of the test facility for over a decade, took great personal
offense to that and told my manager I didn't know what I was talking about.
So, I was told to proceed.

About 6 weeks later when we had everything built and started running through
the test procedure, we blew up a $40K piece of equipment. Then, my manager
stopped everything and told me to reverse engineer the test facility and
update the drawings. Turns out, there were some wires spliced together that
weren't captured in the area of the test facility where I said that we were
guessing.

I think that sometimes non-technical decision makers sometimes having trouble
seeing the technical debt, so if you can make them feel the pain of the debt,
either in cost or schedule, it makes it much more real to them.

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cshipley
I tend to agree. I only had luck when I described it as maintenance and
estimated dollar or schedule costs for not addressing the issue. And then it
was regarded as a one time fix as opposed to something that needed to be done
on a routine basis.

