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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
by 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...
- mbostleman 8y agoDebt is also a good metaphor because, just like finance, it can be used as a beneficial lever that propels you to the next level artificially fast, or it can be used foolishly and end up burying your effort. I see examples of the latter all the time in the experience of developers and how they approach decisions. I have recently worked on largish (or at least in the 10s of millions of dollars of investment to create) codebases in which developers (recently - like 2013) wrote switch statements that became God classes because they simply were not familiar (at least not in practice) with patterns that avoided it. Consider that one example and imagine the type of havoc that lack of experience creates across the entire codebase. You can say this is a case of ignorance, which it is, but it's the same as the ignorance of some to handle money in a sustainable way. It's like giving a credit card to a kid.