> When we notified management they replied, “We’re in a build the plane while flying situation, how can we get this out now without doing a big rewrite?” Even

> When we notified management they replied, “We’re in a build the plane while flying situation, how can we get this out now without doing a big rewrite?” Even worse I tried to catch this before it happened at one company and was stopped. I was transferring to a new project and was the only person who had any experience with a system like they were building at all and was not consulted at all for the initial design. They had made a fatal design mistake that I knew would sink the project and I raised my concerns. Turns out a "technical" manager had made the decision and he wouldn't budge on it for anything. All of management then attempted repeatedly to gaslight the entire team claiming that they had "decades" of experience with the tech and that it was the correct decision despite being given solid references about the problem from many reliable sources outside the team, and continued to say things that directly contradicted the sources. The project hadn't even started yet so the entire situation could have been avoided. Nearly every competent team member left within a few months. Before leaving I witnessed new hires do everything from pushing AWS creds to git to pushing over a GB of docker `.tar` files to a repo... it was bad. Seems just a few middle managers can drown a project/company in technical debt pretty quickly. Edit: "every competent team member" to "nearly every" not sure why some are still there.