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It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of de

It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt. I can give a simple example. I have a coder here that filled the crontab of a server with periodic tasks. One of them was doing +200 failed requests per second and shutdown one of our routers. The router wrote so much logs that it changed the health of its internal disk from 15% to 85%. He doesn't even know what the crontab is. This kind of stuff is bound to happen more and more because the more you use AI to vibe, the more disconnected you get from the technology. And that's why I say, the only way that yolo vibecoding could work is if the base stuff didn't matter.

bigfishrunning 18d ago
> It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but convincing nontechnical management of this fact has been extremely difficult. It was hard in the days of the stackoverflow copy-paste monkeys, and it's even harder in the age of LLMs.
- juvvel 18d ago
  Some people cannot be convinced of this, but some can, as long as you don't use technical language to describe the issue. Essentially, instead of saying "we need to prevent technical debt and have a maintainable software architecture" one needs to say stuff like "software quality enables a faster time-to-market for new features and less customer churn". i.e. put it in business-y terms.
  - sanderjd 18d ago
    Yes, but then it's really important to demonstrate that this is true. If they invest in what you propose, time to market for new features needs to actually become faster, or customer churn needs to actually decrease. It's not enough to put the proposal in business-y terms, it has to actually effect the claimed improvements to the business.
- sanderjd 18d ago
  You have to pick metrics to show management that they understand the importance of, and then be able to demonstrate degradation in those metrics when you don't do what you propose, and improvements when you do. Accomplish this and you'll build trust. Too often, what happens is that the proposed benefit is vague and not empirical, and then the benefit is not actually realized by a large investment into it, destroying trust.

bigfishrunning 18d ago

> It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but convincing nontechnical management of this fact has been extremely difficult. It was hard in the days of the stackoverflow copy-paste monkeys, and it's even harder in the age of LLMs.

juvvel 18d ago
Some people cannot be convinced of this, but some can, as long as you don't use technical language to describe the issue. Essentially, instead of saying "we need to prevent technical debt and have a maintainable software architecture" one needs to say stuff like "software quality enables a faster time-to-market for new features and less customer churn". i.e. put it in business-y terms.
- sanderjd 18d ago
  Yes, but then it's really important to demonstrate that this is true. If they invest in what you propose, time to market for new features needs to actually become faster, or customer churn needs to actually decrease. It's not enough to put the proposal in business-y terms, it has to actually effect the claimed improvements to the business.
sanderjd 18d ago
You have to pick metrics to show management that they understand the importance of, and then be able to demonstrate degradation in those metrics when you don't do what you propose, and improvements when you do. Accomplish this and you'll build trust. Too often, what happens is that the proposed benefit is vague and not empirical, and then the benefit is not actually realized by a large investment into it, destroying trust.