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My LinkedIn title has been “Tech Debt Loan Shark” for years and it has garnered some of the funniest cold opens from recruiters over the years. I don’t think th
by namuol 4y ago
My LinkedIn title has been “Tech Debt Loan Shark” for years and it has garnered some of the funniest cold opens from recruiters over the years. I don’t think there’s a real problem with admitting technical debt at healthy engineering orgs.
I call myself a “Loan Shark” because if you aren’t given an option by leadership to take the time to do something right, “admitting” technical debt is less about “taking blame” than it is about covering your ass. When that debt comes to bite the company later, bring your receipts and use them as leverage to do some proper technical investment driven by the engineers on the ground floor.
- adityaathalye 4y agoThat's hilarious! Does that make Management "Technical Debt CDO Traders"? :) "Loan Shark" nicely anchors the business consequence of piling debt on top of debt. The interest rate ain't gonna be your safe little bond interest rate, it's gonna be whatever the situation says it is.
- layer8 4y ago> has garnered some of the funniest cold opens from recruiters over the years. Please elaborate.
- erikpukinskis 4y agoI also don’t think tech debt is a problem in and of itself. And I’ve worked a number of startups with serious tech debt that was holding back velocity. I really enjoy the challenge of plotting a course out of a hole like that. However in my experience without management buy-in it just won’t happen. Even if you as an engineer do the planning work to make it as easy as possible to pick off low hanging fruit, you’ll typically be seen as “off task”. You’ll get lip service about how code quality matters, because without that they’ll scare away the other devs. But they’ll be hoping you give up and just focus on delivering what the management team is asking for each quarter. It takes a ton of patience and management hand-holding, on the scale of 2+ years to shift the culture. And you have to be willing to forgo any chance at personal advancement for that time. Because you’re “off task”. I think you could take that approach and eventually get an advancement bump around the 3-4 year timeframe but it’s not the fastest way to advance by any means. And the total failure rate for an endeavor like that is pretty high. Maybe more than half. Still, it is fascinating work.