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Technical debt isn't debt. Debt has interest, and you can pay it back. You can use debt to grow. In a sense, debt is a good thing - you can timeshift revenue. B

Technical debt isn't debt. Debt has interest, and you can pay it back. You can use debt to grow. In a sense, debt is a good thing - you can timeshift revenue. Businesses are comfortable with debt. But that's not what we're doing when we create technical "debt". What we call technical debt is really best analogous to an uncovered short sale. We sold something we didn't own (i.e. technical sophistication and proper design) to get something of value (a shipping product) in the hopes we'd never have to cover the asset (fix the bug, upgrade the dependency, etc. - i.e. cash out before the code hits the fan). If you win the bet and you never have to cover the position - it's progress for nothing! Awesome! But, if you do have to cover it - disaster! You're forced to pay any price to cover the short or abandon the feature - maybe the whole project. This can happen at any time. Insanity. In finance we generally don't permit uncovered short positions for a reason - they destabilise markets, and quickly. Transitive dependencies, i.e. systemic risks, abound. Companies have to start talking about software projects and practices in an actuarial sense - and get insurance to cover their naked shorts and wild technical bets.

porpoisely 8y ago
In finance, uncovered short positions happen all the time. Short selling and the options market being prime examples. Also, most debt ( especially fractional fiat debt ) is an uncovered short position. When you are lending something you don't have or own.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  Intentional naked shorting is illegal in most markets, including the US - so, no, they don't. Debt instruments and fractional lending are not an uncovered short position in that one generally is insured in commoditised bond markets against losses due to the non-systemic default of one or a few parties. The money exists, it just doesn't now, but absolutely will exist in the future. That's the difference between debt and naked shorting.
  - twic 8y ago
    >> In finance, uncovered short positions happen all the time. Short selling and the options market being prime examples. > > Intentional naked shorting is illegal in most markets, including the US - so, no, they don't. It's illegal for cash instruments - actual shares and government bonds - but not for futures and options.
zzzcpan 8y ago
It's not a short, technical debt is more like a bet you didn't make at best. If you made that bet, you could have won, but probably not.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  It is a short, you're betting the value of any given action you're not taking will be zero, at any future time, and that it is extremely unlikely to be exercised when its value is non-zero.
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
But according to your description, technical debt is a debt: - it has interest: you're paying extra in maintenance, debugging and manual testing for all the shortcuts you've taken - it can be paid back by refactoring the bad module. The price of such a refactoring is usually known and, unlike in short sale, won't get to infinity - it can be used to grow. Instead of working five years on a perfect solution we build something plausible right now and then keep refining it
- tracer4201 8y ago
  Right on. Also if you continue to build on top of technical debt, you are essentially taking risk and accruing interest in the form of everything that will require on going maintenance or could fail spectacularly depending on your ability to repay the debt.
  - LaserToy 8y ago
    A lot of things can then be explained as a debt. If you ate a cake you were not suppose to - you are putting weight debt. Watched Netflix instead of Ted talks - knowledge debt. Too many Ted talks - entertainment debt. I can go on and on.
    - tracer4201 8y ago
      That’s not really the message I was trying to convey. Not all debt is the same. If your decisions have tangible impact on business outcomes, your company brand, or morale, then anything that adds risk or debt should be weighed carefully as such. You should also weigh personal behaviors and decisions in terms of debt and risk, but that’s orthogonal to the topic of business and engineering decisions.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  And that's why debt is a good metaphor: you have to have a plan to repay it, and that interest you pay should be less than the profit you make by taking on the debt. Take, for example, something like Mozilla's Facebook Container extension [1]. It's fine if they take some shortcuts that allows them to launch that faster if it turns out there's another Facebook scandal in the news - launching faster allows riding the waves of publicity, resulting in more users. Even though the total development effort is more when they have to clean up those shortcuts after launch, the additional effort has been used to grow. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
twic 8y ago
> What we call technical debt is really best analogous to an uncovered short sale Steve Freeman famously described it as an unhedged call option: https://jaxenter.com/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-103059.html https://jaxenter.com/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-103059.htm... The key difference between a short position and a call option is that the former is linear, whereas the latter is not: if things let a little bit worse, a short will lose a little bit of money, whereas a call will cost nothing, but if things get a lot worse, a short will lose a lot of money, and a call may lose an enormous amount of money. Someone who actually works at some dodgy trading company argued that some kinds of debt are like options, and some are like debt - and so potentially, some are like shorts: http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/03/types-of-technical-debt.html http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/03/types-of-technical-debt.ht... So now we just need to calculate our technical debt portfolio's delta, beta, vega, theta, rho ...
matchagaucho 8y ago
Technical debt interest is measured as system entropy. If left unchecked, it will compound and get worse.
mbostleman 8y ago
The debt metaphor is absolutely correct from my perspective, right down to interest. Yes, the debt part is getting something quicker (a shipping product) in exchange for a liability on the balance sheet than we would if we spent more time (reduced sales) and created it in a way that it left no mark on the balance sheet. The interest is generally expressed after the fact in terms of less maintainablity (eg. other changes are more expensive to make) or less performance or a combination of both.
blaze33 8y ago
Maybe debt isn't the best analogy... Adding 30 floors on top of this building with no time to reinforce the foundations first? Sure, I'll call our team of developers, they do that all the time ;)
kminehart 8y ago
I think technical debt falls into the category you describe, and I think businesses _are_ comfortable with technical debt; that's why it exists in every organization. We can use the same terms we would use to define any standard debt you owe to a bank. Let's use "no documentation" as an example. The principal is the amount borrowed, or the time spent writing feature X instead of writing documentation. At some point you'll have to write that documentation, which would be your principal payment. And finally, the interest you're paying on that debt is the time developers have to spend figuring out something that could have been more readily available in documentation. > In a sense, debt is a good thing - you can timeshift revenue. Businesses are comfortable with debt. > But that's not what we're doing when we create technical "debt". I disagree. In the example above, there is plenty to be gained by establishing that debt. That new feature (or however that time was spent) might bring on more customers or generate more revenue, or influence more investment in the product, or whatever. My only wish is that technical debt were more easily measured; the net interest is highly unpredictable, and the overall monetary gain from establishing that debt is also hard to measure, which is why I might personally hesitate to call it a debt. Hopefully that made sense. Edit: Sorry I just realized you got like 20 similar responses. I had HN open for a few hours and when I sat back down I decided to respond.

porpoisely 8y ago

In finance, uncovered short positions happen all the time. Short selling and the options market being prime examples. Also, most debt ( especially fractional fiat debt ) is an uncovered short position. When you are lending something you don't have or own.

justinjlynn 8y ago
Intentional naked shorting is illegal in most markets, including the US - so, no, they don't. Debt instruments and fractional lending are not an uncovered short position in that one generally is insured in commoditised bond markets against losses due to the non-systemic default of one or a few parties. The money exists, it just doesn't now, but absolutely will exist in the future. That's the difference between debt and naked shorting.
- twic 8y ago
  >> In finance, uncovered short positions happen all the time. Short selling and the options market being prime examples. > > Intentional naked shorting is illegal in most markets, including the US - so, no, they don't. It's illegal for cash instruments - actual shares and government bonds - but not for futures and options.

zzzcpan 8y ago

It's not a short, technical debt is more like a bet you didn't make at best. If you made that bet, you could have won, but probably not.

justinjlynn 8y ago
It is a short, you're betting the value of any given action you're not taking will be zero, at any future time, and that it is extremely unlikely to be exercised when its value is non-zero.

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

But according to your description, technical debt is a debt: - it has interest: you're paying extra in maintenance, debugging and manual testing for all the shortcuts you've taken - it can be paid back by refactoring the bad module. The price of such a refactoring is usually known and, unlike in short sale, won't get to infinity - it can be used to grow. Instead of working five years on a perfect solution we build something plausible right now and then keep refining it

tracer4201 8y ago
Right on. Also if you continue to build on top of technical debt, you are essentially taking risk and accruing interest in the form of everything that will require on going maintenance or could fail spectacularly depending on your ability to repay the debt.
- LaserToy 8y ago
  A lot of things can then be explained as a debt. If you ate a cake you were not suppose to - you are putting weight debt. Watched Netflix instead of Ted talks - knowledge debt. Too many Ted talks - entertainment debt. I can go on and on.
  - tracer4201 8y ago
    That’s not really the message I was trying to convey. Not all debt is the same. If your decisions have tangible impact on business outcomes, your company brand, or morale, then anything that adds risk or debt should be weighed carefully as such. You should also weigh personal behaviors and decisions in terms of debt and risk, but that’s orthogonal to the topic of business and engineering decisions.
Vinnl 8y ago
And that's why debt is a good metaphor: you have to have a plan to repay it, and that interest you pay should be less than the profit you make by taking on the debt. Take, for example, something like Mozilla's Facebook Container extension [1]. It's fine if they take some shortcuts that allows them to launch that faster if it turns out there's another Facebook scandal in the news - launching faster allows riding the waves of publicity, resulting in more users. Even though the total development effort is more when they have to clean up those shortcuts after launch, the additional effort has been used to grow. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

twic 8y ago

> What we call technical debt is really best analogous to an uncovered short sale Steve Freeman famously described it as an unhedged call option: https://jaxenter.com/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-103059.html https://jaxenter.com/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-103059.htm... The key difference between a short position and a call option is that the former is linear, whereas the latter is not: if things let a little bit worse, a short will lose a little bit of money, whereas a call will cost nothing, but if things get a lot worse, a short will lose a lot of money, and a call may lose an enormous amount of money. Someone who actually works at some dodgy trading company argued that some kinds of debt are like options, and some are like debt - and so potentially, some are like shorts: http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/03/types-of-technical-debt.html http://blog.jayfields.com/2011/03/types-of-technical-debt.ht... So now we just need to calculate our technical debt portfolio's delta, beta, vega, theta, rho ...

matchagaucho 8y ago

Technical debt interest is measured as system entropy. If left unchecked, it will compound and get worse.

mbostleman 8y ago

The debt metaphor is absolutely correct from my perspective, right down to interest. Yes, the debt part is getting something quicker (a shipping product) in exchange for a liability on the balance sheet than we would if we spent more time (reduced sales) and created it in a way that it left no mark on the balance sheet. The interest is generally expressed after the fact in terms of less maintainablity (eg. other changes are more expensive to make) or less performance or a combination of both.

blaze33 8y ago

Maybe debt isn't the best analogy... Adding 30 floors on top of this building with no time to reinforce the foundations first? Sure, I'll call our team of developers, they do that all the time ;)

kminehart 8y ago

I think technical debt falls into the category you describe, and I think businesses _are_ comfortable with technical debt; that's why it exists in every organization. We can use the same terms we would use to define any standard debt you owe to a bank. Let's use "no documentation" as an example. The principal is the amount borrowed, or the time spent writing feature X instead of writing documentation. At some point you'll have to write that documentation, which would be your principal payment. And finally, the interest you're paying on that debt is the time developers have to spend figuring out something that could have been more readily available in documentation. > In a sense, debt is a good thing - you can timeshift revenue. Businesses are comfortable with debt. > But that's not what we're doing when we create technical "debt". I disagree. In the example above, there is plenty to be gained by establishing that debt. That new feature (or however that time was spent) might bring on more customers or generate more revenue, or influence more investment in the product, or whatever. My only wish is that technical debt were more easily measured; the net interest is highly unpredictable, and the overall monetary gain from establishing that debt is also hard to measure, which is why I might personally hesitate to call it a debt. Hopefully that made sense. Edit: Sorry I just realized you got like 20 similar responses. I had HN open for a few hours and when I sat back down I decided to respond.