(This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what's right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn't returned for payment from me yet... Only time will tell)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me most of the people who have written our most annoying tech debt left the company long time ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah yeah, that would be a worry, except I forgot to mention that most of the code I work on usually gets thrown away after like 6 months. Makes tech debt not have nearly as big of an impact on me.

We do have a longer lasting code base that the little widgets I make run off of. That has a much more strict requirements to ensure tech debt is not introduced specifically so we don't end up in that sort of a position.

That said, and yet we couldn't even keep it out of our own code base. So yeah, I think my original comment is just wrong because I forgot all the ways tech debt actually has effected me in the past and how my industry's project cycle is so short term that i rarely have the opportunity to run into tech debt that I caused in a problematic way...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That make sense. Most industry best practices are there to prevent problems that arises when code is evolving over a long period of time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that makes total sense.

Most software engineers also have to actively maintain and add features to their finished project, and those aspects change a lot about how the problem can be approached.

I failed to take into account why might I have not been effected by tech debt despite occasionally creating it before commenting. Will have to make sure that filter gets a bit stronger lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What industry do you work in?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.

These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.

Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it's a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn't have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client's new order.

I guess I'm just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn't hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn't identify that before now lol

Instead of saying tech debt isn't that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Good on you for acknowledging that. 👍

I've fixed 20 year old issues that could kill people.

Different requirements. Different solutions.

That's why it's great to be an engineer!