
Ask HN: How do you communicate the gravity of tech debt to a new team? - Gabriel_Martin
When joining a new team, upon finding loads of tech debt left by past developers, which nontechnical members of the company&#x27;s leadership are not aware of, what methods have you used to convey the scale of the issue (For example, code that is deeply flawed in many ways, like 1600 line templates with many inline jquery scripts and further dozens of links of un-minified script calls to 500+ line Jquery scripts, not to mention, no build system for the frontend, and seems about 15 years behind current conventions and best practices)?
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kaazhan
I have the exact same problem, i'm pretty curious about what solution will be
proposed.

From my experience it is really case dependant. I went throught several
"legacy" codebases, and everything depends on the willingness of change in the
company. I think my 3 last experiences are revelant of different situations :

1 - Peoples want to change A few years ago I went to a company with some code
from 5+years, with poor quality. It was quite easy to explain peoples we were
facing troubles maintaining the codebase in descent state, since it was a
small company with people involved in dev process/ selling the product.

2 - Clueless people After that i moved to a company with terrible codebase. I
put everything on git and set a dev environment on my first week. It was in
2017. The legacy was unmaintainable, and by speaking with the ceo/cto, we
managed to explain the risks for the company. It took month, but they
understood the urge of refactoring, rewriting, etc. They just were not able to
find a solution by themselves and our help to rationalise the problem and find
effective solution was sufficent to give them understanding of the problem and
willingness on moving forward.

3 - Conservative peoples I moved a few month ago in a really conservative
company with totaly insane codebase. For the moment I have no clue on what to
do to make people understand at what point the code is in a sinistred state.
Tech people understand it but not the rest of the company. Company is
economicaly wealthy and it's really hard to make people understand that it
does hide terrible technical reality.

I personally think the most important point are : \- Explain to your boss what
are the most dangerous problems (unencrypted passwords in DB, that kind of
things) \- Explain what is tech debt \- Explain that current techs are
solutions to those problems \- Speak about the costs

Everything is easier if you are in a small company, wether ir not peoples
around you does have thech background or not. It's easier too if you can prove
what you're saying: with examples of dangerous things understandable by non
tech people, and with POC. For the moment i just does not figure out how to
push the need of purging tech debt when company is wealthy. People feel that
everything goes well and you're just too much of a geek/perfectionnist

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borplk
Try to find a way so that you don't have to communicate the gravity of it. For
example start fixing it slowly and quietly.

