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Tech debt is a choice. Sometimes you'll want to embrace some level of technical debt in order to bring something into production quickly, with the understanding

Tech debt is a choice. Sometimes you'll want to embrace some level of technical debt in order to bring something into production quickly, with the understanding that you will fix later. It's part of a triad with Speed and Quality. That may not be the choice Twitter has made in this instance, but it's a viable choice nonetheless. Defaulting to tech debt = evil wrong imo.

cel1ne 10y ago
And sometime a workaround is the best solution you'll get. Because solving the problem properly might introduce new issues, which might require new workarounds.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Exactly. The operative part of "workaround" is "work".
dingaling 10y ago
The problem with technical debt versus financial debt is that the latter has a monthly mandatory cost ( interest payments ) that can't be ignored and which is visible all the way up to the C-level, whereas middle-management can keep obscuring the presence of technical debt and pushing its repayment out to the right. Essentially it's a 'free' internal debt, regardless of how often architects and developers complain of its cost. Thus in a contest between doing something right, but expensively, versus good-enough-for-now but technically-constrained the latter will usually win.
- tomblomfield 10y ago
  It's not "free", it's just much harder to measure. The cost is reduced development velocity, and perhaps reduced systems stability.
  - lostcolony 10y ago
    Which developers get blamed for, even though it was a managerial decision to take on the debt. Financial debt has clear cost; technical debt doesn't. So it seems 'free' to the non-technical.
rhizome 10y ago
Sometimes it seems like "technical debt" is used as a dysphemism for "refactorable." We see railing against technical debt, then tomorrow there's a "code is never finished" post that gets nods all around. A bit of a strawman, but my point is that there's a big picture of the technology lifecycle that somehow fosters disparate contexts for the same exact thing.

cel1ne 10y ago

And sometime a workaround is the best solution you'll get. Because solving the problem properly might introduce new issues, which might require new workarounds.

paulddraper 10y ago
Exactly. The operative part of "workaround" is "work".

dingaling 10y ago

The problem with technical debt versus financial debt is that the latter has a monthly mandatory cost ( interest payments ) that can't be ignored and which is visible all the way up to the C-level, whereas middle-management can keep obscuring the presence of technical debt and pushing its repayment out to the right. Essentially it's a 'free' internal debt, regardless of how often architects and developers complain of its cost. Thus in a contest between doing something right, but expensively, versus good-enough-for-now but technically-constrained the latter will usually win.

tomblomfield 10y ago
It's not "free", it's just much harder to measure. The cost is reduced development velocity, and perhaps reduced systems stability.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  Which developers get blamed for, even though it was a managerial decision to take on the debt. Financial debt has clear cost; technical debt doesn't. So it seems 'free' to the non-technical.

rhizome 10y ago

Sometimes it seems like "technical debt" is used as a dysphemism for "refactorable." We see railing against technical debt, then tomorrow there's a "code is never finished" post that gets nods all around. A bit of a strawman, but my point is that there's a big picture of the technology lifecycle that somehow fosters disparate contexts for the same exact thing.