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“ and proactively paying down debt is a necessary investment in overall engineering health.” Sometimes it’s cheaper overall to default on certain tech debt rat

“ and proactively paying down debt is a necessary investment in overall engineering health.” Sometimes it’s cheaper overall to default on certain tech debt rather than pay it down. As long as the product managers don’t try to collect.

wlll 3y ago
The analogy only goes so far and it's not clear to me what you mean, what do you mean "default on tech debt"? Re-write? Give up and just accept the penalty when changing systems?
- camel_gopher 3y ago
  Build quickly with abandon to see if you get product market fit. Throw one away.
  - pastacacioepepe 3y ago
    When you finally find product market fit you'll have a hundred other things to worry about before you can even approach a rewrite. Result: you're now stuck with a ton of tech debt and a flimsy product.
    - wlll 3y ago
      Yep, this is the majority of my experience, and clawing a way back from that sustainably has been a fairly large part of my consulting/contracting career over the years.
      - coffeebeqn 3y ago
        Haha ain’t that the truth. The rest of the company isn’t going to “throw away” and tread water for 6 months when they finally get traction
  - danjac 3y ago
    I have never, ever in my career ever seen one "thrown away". Unless the project or startup itself dies, of course. Once something is built, and in production in the hands of end users, it is something that needs to be maintained and built on and fixed over time. It's never thrown away. Now if you are lucky, it has been well-written and designed so that parts can be refactored over time as new features are needed and old ones deprecated. If it's shoddily built and rushed because you couldn't afford or couldn't be bothered to do it right the first time, then that's going to be tech debt you are going to have to deal with for years to come.
  - Jare 3y ago
    I've only ever been involved in something close to that "tech debt default" in my career. All other cases of throwing something out were either planned to begin with (so intentionally a throwaway prototype, not tech debt), or just giving up on the product (tech debt included, but who cares at that point). (the case I was in was the game Commandos. We completely threw away all source code for the sequel, which we wrote from scratch with different architecture, tech and even somewhat different coding standards. Getting rid of the tech debt that Commandos accumulated over the yearlong deathmarch was nice, but without the completely different architecture needs I doubt it would have happened)
ericjohannsen 3y ago
Agreed. Sometimes the project is small enough and the debt large enough that a rewrite is in order. However, a project of any size and complexity only reaches tech bankruptcy when the advice given in the book isn't followed; when tech debt is ignored for the benefit of shipping features, which become increasinly hard to release and increasingly prone to bugs.

wlll 3y ago

The analogy only goes so far and it's not clear to me what you mean, what do you mean "default on tech debt"? Re-write? Give up and just accept the penalty when changing systems?

camel_gopher 3y ago
Build quickly with abandon to see if you get product market fit. Throw one away.
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  When you finally find product market fit you'll have a hundred other things to worry about before you can even approach a rewrite. Result: you're now stuck with a ton of tech debt and a flimsy product.
  - wlll 3y ago
    Yep, this is the majority of my experience, and clawing a way back from that sustainably has been a fairly large part of my consulting/contracting career over the years.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Haha ain’t that the truth. The rest of the company isn’t going to “throw away” and tread water for 6 months when they finally get traction
- danjac 3y ago
  I have never, ever in my career ever seen one "thrown away". Unless the project or startup itself dies, of course. Once something is built, and in production in the hands of end users, it is something that needs to be maintained and built on and fixed over time. It's never thrown away. Now if you are lucky, it has been well-written and designed so that parts can be refactored over time as new features are needed and old ones deprecated. If it's shoddily built and rushed because you couldn't afford or couldn't be bothered to do it right the first time, then that's going to be tech debt you are going to have to deal with for years to come.
- Jare 3y ago
  I've only ever been involved in something close to that "tech debt default" in my career. All other cases of throwing something out were either planned to begin with (so intentionally a throwaway prototype, not tech debt), or just giving up on the product (tech debt included, but who cares at that point). (the case I was in was the game Commandos. We completely threw away all source code for the sequel, which we wrote from scratch with different architecture, tech and even somewhat different coding standards. Getting rid of the tech debt that Commandos accumulated over the yearlong deathmarch was nice, but without the completely different architecture needs I doubt it would have happened)

ericjohannsen 3y ago

Agreed. Sometimes the project is small enough and the debt large enough that a rewrite is in order. However, a project of any size and complexity only reaches tech bankruptcy when the advice given in the book isn't followed; when tech debt is ignored for the benefit of shipping features, which become increasinly hard to release and increasingly prone to bugs.