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Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#201

Post by 72deluxe »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #191

I was CTO of a company that had a two-week outage due to technical debt. I didn't sleep much for any of it. We fixed it, and we'd lost about 30% of our subscriber base in that period. The company took on new funding to survive, invested that in a new set of products, and shuttered the old stuff just to stay afloat. I am currently working in a business where there is a nearly 8-year old Rails app (600+ models, 250+ co…

I would say that 8 years to write 60k LOC is slow. I worked as the sole GUI software engineer for a hardware firm and wrote > 100K LOC in 3 years, not including the test projects proceeding the actual real project. This was in C++, and included client/server stuff, entirely custom resizeable GUI, OpenGL 3D graphics and modelling of 3D assets and textures etc too. And getting it running under OSX + Win32, fixing issues on both.

And that wasn't a stressful place to work with insane deadlines - it was fairly relaxed for the most part.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#202

Post by [deleted] »

72deluxe wrote: post #201
PaulRobinson wrote: post #191

I was CTO of a company that had a two-week outage due to technical debt. I didn't sleep much for any of it. We fixed it, and we'd lost about 30% of our subscriber base in that period. The company took on new funding to survive, invested that in a new set of products, and shuttered the old stuff just to stay afloat. I am currently working in a business where there is a nearly 8-year old Rails app (600+ models, 250+ co…

I would say that 8 years to write 60k LOC is slow. I worked as the sole GUI software engineer for a hardware firm and wrote > 100K LOC in 3 years, not including the test projects proceeding the actual real project. This was in C++, and included client/server stuff, entirely custom resizeable GUI, OpenGL 3D graphics and modelling of 3D assets and textures etc too. And getting it running under OSX + Win32, fixing issue…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#203

Post by voidlogic »

When I was a consultant I saw it happen often, BUT, seldom does technical debt get called out explicitly as a reason for failure. More usually it goes like this:

feature requests with no mind to maintainability/cleanup -> tech debt -> slow dev. velocity -> failure to deliver features for the businesses -> failure to retain/grow/compete

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#204

Post by bandrami »

dx034 wrote: post #37
mgkimsal wrote: post #26

Yes and no. The project wasn't killed specifically because "you have technical debt". It was killed because there was no way for anyone to be effective with the combination of poor undocumented code. "We need to change the email message that goes out when someone registers". This took a team of (4?) people 5 calendar days to change. As a contractor, I had to vpn in to one system, then remote desktop over another vpn…

Templates stored across a database is probably the worst thing I've seen repeatedly across projects. Just because a database can store everything doesn't mean it has to. Some people really seem(ed) to have an allergy to plain files for storage. A plain file with OS level caching will beat most (if not all) databases for static content. But doesn't sound as fancy, so it's probably harder to charge a lot of money for i…

And you aren't kidding about "repeatedly". Personally I associate it with the late 1990s/early oughts and ColdFusion; I think one of the early CF frameworks really encouraged it, and it kind of just stuck from there, particularly in Government web work. But it's probably wider than that...

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#205

Post by lacampbell »

beat wrote: post #188
mywacaday wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned over time that its always better to assume that who came before me were smarter than me and knew more than me (I'm rarely proved wrong).

"They did it that way because they where stupid" is a ridiculously common assumption, when the correct answer is often "They did it that way because they knew stuff I don't know".

There's obviously a lot of stuff I don't know then. Like the benefits of copy pasted code, or 300 column lines, or implementing the logic in 20 places when it has existed in the standard library for a decade. If only the ancient sage I inherited this code base from had left notes to guide me on this path of wisdom.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#206

Post by gizmo »

72deluxe wrote: post #201
PaulRobinson wrote: post #191

I was CTO of a company that had a two-week outage due to technical debt. I didn't sleep much for any of it. We fixed it, and we'd lost about 30% of our subscriber base in that period. The company took on new funding to survive, invested that in a new set of products, and shuttered the old stuff just to stay afloat. I am currently working in a business where there is a nearly 8-year old Rails app (600+ models, 250+ co…

I would say that 8 years to write 60k LOC is slow. I worked as the sole GUI software engineer for a hardware firm and wrote > 100K LOC in 3 years, not including the test projects proceeding the actual real project. This was in C++, and included client/server stuff, entirely custom resizeable GUI, OpenGL 3D graphics and modelling of 3D assets and textures etc too. And getting it running under OSX + Win32, fixing issue…

You can't compare C++ with Ruby code. Rails code especially can very easily become a hairball where everything happens "somewhere else". You don't have static type checking or other compile time hints to figure out what is going on. You can't see which functions are called from which call sites. Refactoring tools? Forget it. Ruby is a very compact and flexible language, but if you're not disciplined you'll pay the price for it.

A 60kloc C++ project is small and easily manageable, a 60kloc Ruby hairball can drive a person insane.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#207

Post by 72deluxe »

riprowan wrote: post #119

I am working on a project now that bears some study. I built this extranet app for a Fortune-class / NYSE company in 2001. They were a Lotus Domino shop so for that and various other reasons the extranet was deployed in Domino. The initial rollout was considered quite successful, but it was definitely "v1" code, and I'm being really generous with the code quality. Plus, Domino. The application was considered a stopga…

That's insane. Couldn't someone write a program to parse the XML into appropriate data structures for use by a third party web server?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#208

Post by RangerScience »

72deluxe wrote: post #201
PaulRobinson wrote: post #191

I was CTO of a company that had a two-week outage due to technical debt. I didn't sleep much for any of it. We fixed it, and we'd lost about 30% of our subscriber base in that period. The company took on new funding to survive, invested that in a new set of products, and shuttered the old stuff just to stay afloat. I am currently working in a business where there is a nearly 8-year old Rails app (600+ models, 250+ co…

I would say that 8 years to write 60k LOC is slow. I worked as the sole GUI software engineer for a hardware firm and wrote > 100K LOC in 3 years, not including the test projects proceeding the actual real project. This was in C++, and included client/server stuff, entirely custom resizeable GUI, OpenGL 3D graphics and modelling of 3D assets and textures etc too. And getting it running under OSX + Win32, fixing issue…

Rails code. You get a lot of bang for your buck. That, and the "greater" metric for the project complexity is the stupidly high number of controllers and models.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#209

Post by RangerScience »

TheCoreh wrote: post #200
luhn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on how technical debt caused a two-week outage?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably an issue with the build/deploy system. Perhaps someone deployed a broken build, then tried to revert/rollback, and realized that the previous version didn't build "cleanly" anymore. This could happen if you have a lot of dependencies, switched compiler versions but left the binaries "in place" and deployed changes incrementally.

Yet another reason I swear by Heroku - you can rollback to the actual prior release, not rollback the code and try to rebuild.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?

#210

Post by golergka »

72deluxe wrote: post #201
PaulRobinson wrote: post #191

I was CTO of a company that had a two-week outage due to technical debt. I didn't sleep much for any of it. We fixed it, and we'd lost about 30% of our subscriber base in that period. The company took on new funding to survive, invested that in a new set of products, and shuttered the old stuff just to stay afloat. I am currently working in a business where there is a nearly 8-year old Rails app (600+ models, 250+ co…

I would say that 8 years to write 60k LOC is slow. I worked as the sole GUI software engineer for a hardware firm and wrote > 100K LOC in 3 years, not including the test projects proceeding the actual real project. This was in C++, and included client/server stuff, entirely custom resizeable GUI, OpenGL 3D graphics and modelling of 3D assets and textures etc too. And getting it running under OSX + Win32, fixing issue…

LOC differ not only by the language or technical difficulty of the task, but by business requirement difficulty as well.

If, for example, they're in banking and finance, and those LOC deal with fine details of tax code... Oh boy.

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