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A former colleague of mine had a good way to describe it: technical debt is like financial debt, too much will kill you but if you don’t have any you will be ou

• marginalia_nu 2y ago
  > A former colleague of mine had a good way to describe it: technical debt is like financial debt, too much will kill you but if you don’t have any you will be outgunned by those that do. Yeah, this is a very astute observation. It's also worth noting that the cost of technical debt is higher for larger organizations. Refactoring is very cheap when you're just one or a few people, but prohibitively expensive to the point of impossible when working in a much larger organization. I think it's generally a bad idea to write code to large-organization standards when you're working alone. It makes your process much more rigid than it needs to be. The great benefit of flying solo or with a small team is exactly how nimble you can be, the small cost of re-writes and even throwing stuff away.
  • fsckboy 2y ago
    >Yeah, this is a very astute observation. isn't it just repeating the definition/use of debt which is why "technical debt" was called that in the first place?
    • marginalia_nu 2y ago
      In many cases, points of view obvious to the point of childlike can be easily overlooked and very helpful.