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So true! I used to manage a project where one star engineer would always say we needed to stop work on features and re-engineer parts of the project so it "mad

So true! I used to manage a project where one star engineer would always say we needed to stop work on features and re-engineer parts of the project so it "made more sense" or "wasn't a mess." We didn't have a lot of bugs or performance issues but this person felt parts of the code base were terribly designed and slowing down development. Other star engineers sort of agreed but did not consider it as urgent. But even when we set aside time to plan it they couldn't agree on a better design for the parts of the backend / app in question. One person's refactoring would have become another's technical debt. So technical debt is certainly real but also sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

jamescostian 3y ago
I think a lot of really smart people end up claiming something like "this whole system wasn't designed properly, we can do it way cleaner if we redesign it from the ground up" but it's always a trap. Incremental improvements take less time, can be more easily understood, are safer to deploy. But a lot of those really smart people have perfectionistic tendencies that cloud their judgement, and nobody can imagine all the different paper cuts that will get in the way of their beautiful vision. And thus, the new technical debt (to someone else) is written