> Old products: These were neither retired nor given appropriate resources, so they instead decayed over time. This is the biggest one where I work. Call it te

> Old products: These were neither retired nor given appropriate resources, so they instead decayed over time. This is the biggest one where I work. Call it technical debt, legacy systems, or aborted migrations - we have multiple generations of products doing the same thing. Management comes in bright eyed with a desire to migrate to the new system. Not too bad at first, we get some quick wins. Then the 80/20 rule hits, people realise how hard the rest will be and we decide to put it on hold temporarily (i.e. forever). This is the worst of both worlds, as we now only have the most complicated and ugly applications using the old system. There is nothing easy to train new people on. Over time fewer and fewer people truly understand the old system, work gets slower, and more error prone. But hey, there's another new system coming along - maybe we can move to that, along with all the fresh easy work we setup in the last few years. Cue xkcd comic about a solution making more problems. The other side of this is policy and procedure cruft: having so many different systems makes mistakes more likely. Every mistake means an investigation and an item added to a multi-page policy document. You'd never get everything done if you fully adhered to it, but it makes people feel safe.