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Tech is debt. It is best to have none, but often taking some on leaves you better off. What is of concern, generally speaking, is your debt service ratio. The
by randomdata 4y ago
Tech is debt. It is best to have none, but often taking some on leaves you better off.
What is of concern, generally speaking, is your debt service ratio. The costs to maintain the tech relative to the benefit it brings.
If you derive significantly more benefit than the maintenance cost then your tech debt is healthy. As costs start to approach the benefit, or worse exceed it, then you have a problem. Either you need to settle your debts (give back the tech to the nothingness you borrowed it from), or refinance at a lower rate.
A complete rewrite repays the old debt and takes on new debt in hopes of a new lender providing a lower rate, but not only does this not eliminate debt the new lenders can be tricky and squeeze you when you’re not looking, more often than not leaving you with an even higher rate. The devil you know can certainly be beneficial.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoI don't know why some devs think rewriting everything will make everything better, the resultant lost business knowledge be damned. From what I've seen the ones who advocate that usually just don't know what they're doing in general.
- dmlittle 4y agoFor what it’s worth sometimes it’s worth abandoning old legacy context in a rewrite if the new solution drastically reduces operational complexity. For example, it’s cheaper/better to retrain everyone on the new solution than it is to continue to onboard new folks to the legacy one. This is not always the case, but sometime it is as the parent comment mentions.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoCan you point to an example of a software project that was re-written without the rewrite causing more problems than it solved? Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow wrote an article on this very topic, titled "Things you should never do - part 1“