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My framework to think through technical debt: I don't think of it as debt (negatively connoted) but business investment. When you take a debt it's usually to f

My framework to think through technical debt: I don't think of it as debt (negatively connoted) but business investment. When you take a debt it's usually to finance something. Focusing the wording on debt highlights the negative side of the trade off. It's like we're suddenly all turned fiscal austerity hawks, where any bit of debt is evil. I feel like developers are each placed somewhere on a continuum from purist to entrepreneurs. Purists can spend weeks to tweak an SQL query, while entrepreneurs would be happy with a no-code Zapier MVP that actually lands customers It's not to say that one is always better than the other. A balanced team probably needs both. In our company, I'm more on the entrepreneur side (which I guess is good for launching a startup) but the recent addition of a "purist" to the team has improved our codebase significantly.

weego 7y ago
That fits with my belief that the notion of having technical debt is a luxury that only a measure of success brings. Until you're in a place where you have a excess of resources (time and money) all you have is code. Obviously with experience you can make decisions that can lower the volume of technical debt once you reach that breakpoint, but in my view the right play is always to get to that moment as efficiently as possible and that never involves re-architecting or rewriting until then.
wccrawford 7y ago
People who understand financial debt don't think of it as evil. It's a tool they use. Technical debt is the same way, and I often talk about it that way at work. But it's a phrase that means something that "business investment" doesn't. When I tell my boss that we're incurring technical debt (and what exactly that debt is), he is already in the "business investment" mindset on the matter. I'm the one trying to reign that in and focus on making the future easier by avoiding some of that debt now. But I fully understand both sides of the matter.

weego 7y ago

That fits with my belief that the notion of having technical debt is a luxury that only a measure of success brings. Until you're in a place where you have a excess of resources (time and money) all you have is code. Obviously with experience you can make decisions that can lower the volume of technical debt once you reach that breakpoint, but in my view the right play is always to get to that moment as efficiently as possible and that never involves re-architecting or rewriting until then.

wccrawford 7y ago

People who understand financial debt don't think of it as evil. It's a tool they use. Technical debt is the same way, and I often talk about it that way at work. But it's a phrase that means something that "business investment" doesn't. When I tell my boss that we're incurring technical debt (and what exactly that debt is), he is already in the "business investment" mindset on the matter. I'm the one trying to reign that in and focus on making the future easier by avoiding some of that debt now. But I fully understand both sides of the matter.