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After owning a house, I feel like technical debt is much more closely related to building homes and doing remodels. You can always cheap out and get it done sl

After owning a house, I feel like technical debt is much more closely related to building homes and doing remodels. You can always cheap out and get it done slightly faster and slightly cheaper. And you might not have to suffer the consequences. But someone down the line likely will. E.g. we recently had to install a cleanout for the sewer mainline in our house. Apparently when they built the house, they did everything but install the final above-ground cleanout - instead they just capped it off below ground. The other work, except for the above ground part, all had to be done for testing purposes anyways. But by not installing the above ground part they managed to save something like $10 for each house they built. But now, instead, I had to pay a company $1,200 in labor (they spent all day digging) to install a $20 part when our sewer backed up. I work in a codebase full of bad, willful technical debt like this. "Let's just do it the easy way" - despite the "hard" way not being harder, just more different than they were used to at the time. Or hard coding things despite being able to derive it from other information - "we can do it later" - good luck, differences creep in and you will spend weeks or even months figuring out all these minor differences and whether they are on accident or on purpose. 6 months down the line, that easy way is completely fucking us up. Certain changes that would have taken an hour take days. And it was completely predictable at the time.

tehlike 7y ago
This is true, but i doubt it was just 10$ piece - they did many of these shortcuts that probably didn't matter. They probably didn't use the _best_ material on your kitchen countertop, because the marginal value over good enough is not there. In a similar analogy to yours, most of these systems tend to cause outage somewhere, which are then usually patched on the fly. Depending on a project, shipping fast is usually more valuable than not shipping it for a year. From my pov, i used to be in advertising, and not releasing a billion dollar feature for a year would, by definition, cost a billion dollars a year. If it explodes after releasing, you are still better of by a huge marging because outage would cost much less. Once you have the business going, you can spend money and manpower on the problem, too. I think this is key: "Hard way not being harder". This depends. Engineers like to overengineer, and without proper supervision they tend to favor technical excellence over business usecase - it needs to be a balance. On the house example, i bet the value of your house still increased, and the 1500$ you paid is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Just like business & rewrite. Overall, don't get me wrong, I like to use my best skills and put a shiny design out, but i don't do it because I favor doing "good enough".

tehlike 7y ago

This is true, but i doubt it was just 10$ piece - they did many of these shortcuts that probably didn't matter. They probably didn't use the _best_ material on your kitchen countertop, because the marginal value over good enough is not there. In a similar analogy to yours, most of these systems tend to cause outage somewhere, which are then usually patched on the fly. Depending on a project, shipping fast is usually more valuable than not shipping it for a year. From my pov, i used to be in advertising, and not releasing a billion dollar feature for a year would, by definition, cost a billion dollars a year. If it explodes after releasing, you are still better of by a huge marging because outage would cost much less. Once you have the business going, you can spend money and manpower on the problem, too. I think this is key: "Hard way not being harder". This depends. Engineers like to overengineer, and without proper supervision they tend to favor technical excellence over business usecase - it needs to be a balance. On the house example, i bet the value of your house still increased, and the 1500$ you paid is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Just like business & rewrite. Overall, don't get me wrong, I like to use my best skills and put a shiny design out, but i don't do it because I favor doing "good enough".