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Does anyone have any examples of companies that died because of too much technical debt? For me its kind of one of those things I acknowledge exists but I try t

• Jtsummers 6y ago
  Not a company, but a project. It has not died yet, it is instead being rewritten while the old one is on life support. The technical debt accrued due to: 1. Poor code practices (C++, poor use or understanding of pointers and threads created most of the actual errors in the program that make it unstable) 2. Excessive copy/paste (so bad decisions propagated quickly) 3. Poor architecture (didn't scale, performance is technically fine but development costs exploded as new capabilities were added) 4. Poor testing (almost entirely manual, as the system grew this grew with it to the point of creating major delays in releases) They're rewriting it now keeping these lessons in mind. They're surviving because they're part of a larger org that can afford to keep them around for the rewrite, but essentially this now 10-12 year old system is dead. The other reason they're surviving is they happen to have only one competitor, whose product costs 10x as much per seat. So their customers want them to survive if they can hit the quality improvements in the rewrite, failing that they'll be disbanded.
• deleted 6y ago
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