> When I read OP's question I was thinking about already-shipped products that became too hard to run and maintain. I've been mostly in consumer electronics re

> When I read OP's question I was thinking about already-shipped products that became too hard to run and maintain. I've been mostly in consumer electronics related companies, where a product which ships and then becomes too hard to maintain usually doesn't "fail". It just gets phased out. In a way, this is another way technical debt has an indirect, but large impact on products: obsolescence becomes a necessity. Not so much planned — which implies malice — as simply realizing it's not possible to maintain indefinitely. > I am curious how long your products/projects were in development for before falling to tech debt? Were these net-new projects? Usually very quickly, or after far too long. The better projects know ahead of time that there are Dragons lurking in the code base. But that's effectively saying there are projects which never even got past brainstorming because we knew the technical debt was too high. On the other hand, there are projects where it only becomes apparent how much debt there is after a lot has already been invested. It's like you'd expect, e.g "There's a performance problem because of a basic primitive this library uses everywhere. And that was originally a workaround for a compiler performance bug. We could fix the compiler bug, but it turns out other libraries relied on it..." and so on. Extra time-to-market makes a product make less and less sense — fashions change, hardware improves, new tech arrives — and so it gets killed. Or worse, shipped.