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It’s really hard to convey tech debt cost. Probably many systems have a ton of problems adding 5% to every feature here, 10% there, bad DB design from early in the project that makes a bunch of actions far riskier than they should be (but until it breaks several times no-one cares and if your devs are putting 3x as much effort into those dangerous operations and know what they’re doing, it won’t), and so on. Communicating that in a way the business folks will care about is hard, and the full costs are difficult to account for.

[edit] hell, communicating that in a way the weaker end of technical managers will care about can be hard, for that matter. If they came up “doing it wrong” and are of a certain mindset, good friggin’ luck.




Never ask permission to do what has to be done. If they say no, and you do it anyway, then you are being insubordinate. If you don’t do it and then point to the decision as a reason why the project is failing, then you are right, but are a failure.


And if you take too long to ship you're still a failure.

I personally force stakeholders to define sunset dates on the system / code ill be writing.

If its sunset date is never, cost of development proportional to roi approaches zero.

If the sunset date is near, cost of development gets very, very expensive.

Having that information both informs my priorities and the understanding of how long development will take / cost.


> If its sunset date is never, cost of development proportional to roi approaches zero.

I am not sure that is good economics, because the discount rate for the future revenue approaches 100% over extended time.


Does it?

Not everything is monetarily cost based.

Cant recreate a space probe 30 years ago to replace the one malfunctioning now.

Cant recreate makret share gained against compeitors with stability problems.

Interesting point though, definitely ignored it til now.

Iguess the point is, everything is a trade off, and we shouldnt be acting like its either high quality or high throughput or high cost. Its somehwere in between and you get to choose depending on your contlstraints and needs.


People caring only a limited amount about technical debt is rational, arguably. Opportunity cost is high.

And lots of organizations would be willing to borrow money at a usurious interest rate-- why not borrow technology for the same? ;)




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