The only new idea this article has is giving a cute name to something thats been going on for ages. Assigning malice to the people who understand how to work w

The only new idea this article has is giving a cute name to something thats been going on for ages. Assigning malice to the people who understand how to work within the technical debt on a project is age-old programming nonsense. It was - and continues to be - a stupid thing to do. This article just makes it a bit more conspiratorial, and re-writes the old story to become less falsifiable. Rather than accuse someone of simply being counterproductive to protect their job security, the fault is found in their ego and subconscious actions. It's comforting to find a way to frame a problem such that you can blame a person for holding out. But the barrier to entry on a codebase is just another form of technical debt. It's no fun to accept that codebases evolves in such a way to accumulated debt, or that the development plan might have even accelerated that accumulation for other short term goals. It's doubly no fun to think about scheduling developers to pay down that debt.