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That sounds like debt in time against the technical aspects of the system in question. If only we as an industry had some label for this Technical Debt so that

• vorg 10y ago
  All business is about borrowing stuff from the future -- getting as much gain as possible now and deferring the costs as far as possible into the future, when someone else needs to pay back the debt, or when it can be defaulted on. Business managers don't let tech workers spend time refactoring because it violates this basic business principle. They will make up some other positive-sounding label, e.g. Agile Development, and bandy that around instead. When the system's technical debt is called in, those managers will have already moved to another system to pull the same con, or they'll replace the system with a fresh one complete with green-card-seeking programmers. The programmers on the old system will be retrenched without payment via stack-ranking, and their health problems caused from stress and lack of sleep forgotten about.