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Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs (idiallo.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Whenever the topic comes up with leadership, I try to explain it in financial terms.

Tech debt is just like financial debt. There are times when its appropriate and necessary to take on some debt. But debt accumulates interest charges. If we just keep building up more debt without ever paying it down, it'll eventually bankrupt the company.

The engineering team doesn't always know when the finance team is accumulating debt or paying it back, but we trust that they are doing so appropriately.

You don't always know when the engineering team is accumulating or paying off debt, but you need to trust that when we say we need time to to pay down tech debt, we're serious. We'll all be out of a job if we don't.

They don't usually like to hear it, but when put in those terms, they don't have an argument against it. I'm sure if we could provide a statement showing we had $478,562.78 in tech debt at 4.75%, they'd be more understanding about paying it down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fortunately, my boss is sympathetic, but unfortunately, our stakeholders aren't. We are given time for tech debt (10-20%), but that hasn't been achievable recently due to a huge focus on delivery. We just reorged, and we're trying to get a bunch of people new to our business unit on-boarded w/ our product, and they have a variety of requirements that we need to meet for that to happen. Things should settle down in a few months, but in the meantime, I try to fix some low-hanging fruit that directly improves morale for the team.

My org is better than most, I think, but it's still an issue here. It's absolutely crazy the difference between prioritized and unprioritized tech debt. For example, our architect wants a thing, so it gets done same day. Our dev team wants a thing, and it takes months, if not years. It's getting better, but like anything, it's two steps forward (finally got to trunk-based dev) and one step back (other teams whining about changes).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think everywhere I've worked has said "we have 20% time for tech debt" but has never actually done that. It's always "we need to ship this by end of week" and "the CEO wants us to add the thing we said we'd cut so we could make the deadline".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

So far, we've only had one or two deadlines come from outside the dev team, and up until this year, we got close to that 20%. So hopefully it's a temporary change due to our new CEO trying to catch up to our competitors in a few areas.