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I think this kind of talking about technical debt is mostly just nonsense. If there is any interest percentage to be put on this it is far higher than any sort

by cjfd 5y ago

I think this kind of talking about technical debt is mostly just nonsense. If there is any interest percentage to be put on this it is far higher than any sort of financial department would be prepared to accept on a loan. From which it follows that the first so-called 'preconceived notion', namely 'tech debt = bad' is actually correct. The other side of the argument is the question who one lets decide what is sound architecture is. There are many, many, many architecture astronauts and cargo cultists out there. I think one reason that in practice keeping on 'technical debt' makes any sense is that one does not know whether or not the trust the person who comes up with the payback plan.

vlovich123 5y ago
I disagree on this. The right way to think about it is that nearly every line of code you write is almost certainly tech debt, even more so earlier on in a project where you’re just exploring the problem domain at the same time as you’re building the solution. Indeed, when I’ve looked at histories, once a developer stops being active, their name disappears from the git history relatively quickly (that’s not a perfect estimate, but it’s the best heuristic I could think of. equivalent to LOC - bad in the wrong hands, good as a general directional rule of thumb) Also people think of tech debt as a loan which is a fine analogy but it’s important to understand it doesn’t map perfectly. Some have a high interest which means your current path is just adding this code debt to more pieces in your codebase (eg a bad convention you know you need to address). Other debt is more sporadic but doesn’t really grow (eg you have to remember to do weird thing X every time you do a Y). It may manifest as a parasitic effect on your velocity (more manual processes and/or more bugs). Additionally, unlike an actual loan balance sheet, there’s no way to quantify any of this. So agreeing on tech debt can even be hard (what one person sees as tech debt another might see as at least having consistency with the rest of the code around it). If you can’t measure then you’re all talking about an amorphous concept no one really agrees on 100% and basically paying down things that everyone agrees on as debt OR getting lucky and finding secondary quantifiable measurements that correlate with what you’re arguing for as debt.
ant6n 5y ago
The interest on technical debt may be high, but you don't have to pay it if the product becomes obsolete, replaced, unsuccessful or improved. Basically you only need to pay the debt if the product is successful/used and not fixed, which in terms of overall risk is very different from a loan that you need to pay back no matter what. (It's sometimes perhaps more like VC finding - a very high cost for the provided up front money, but only in a small set of circumstances where the overall success makes the cost relatively small)

by cjfd 5y ago

vlovich123 5y ago

I disagree on this. The right way to think about it is that nearly every line of code you write is almost certainly tech debt, even more so earlier on in a project where you’re just exploring the problem domain at the same time as you’re building the solution. Indeed, when I’ve looked at histories, once a developer stops being active, their name disappears from the git history relatively quickly (that’s not a perfect estimate, but it’s the best heuristic I could think of. equivalent to LOC - bad in the wrong hands, good as a general directional rule of thumb) Also people think of tech debt as a loan which is a fine analogy but it’s important to understand it doesn’t map perfectly. Some have a high interest which means your current path is just adding this code debt to more pieces in your codebase (eg a bad convention you know you need to address). Other debt is more sporadic but doesn’t really grow (eg you have to remember to do weird thing X every time you do a Y). It may manifest as a parasitic effect on your velocity (more manual processes and/or more bugs). Additionally, unlike an actual loan balance sheet, there’s no way to quantify any of this. So agreeing on tech debt can even be hard (what one person sees as tech debt another might see as at least having consistency with the rest of the code around it). If you can’t measure then you’re all talking about an amorphous concept no one really agrees on 100% and basically paying down things that everyone agrees on as debt OR getting lucky and finding secondary quantifiable measurements that correlate with what you’re arguing for as debt.

ant6n 5y ago

The interest on technical debt may be high, but you don't have to pay it if the product becomes obsolete, replaced, unsuccessful or improved. Basically you only need to pay the debt if the product is successful/used and not fixed, which in terms of overall risk is very different from a loan that you need to pay back no matter what. (It's sometimes perhaps more like VC finding - a very high cost for the provided up front money, but only in a small set of circumstances where the overall success makes the cost relatively small)