Almost all of them. It becomes cheaper to buy someone else's product than to continue development. Because the NIH product has its costs spread over all the buyers.
Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
31–40 of 331 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#32Our product, a large-scale enterprise software, is slowly getting killed.
It's old and it's rather unusable (by the users).
Plus, for "backward compatibility", it supports dozens of strange configurations. It's dragged down by so much technical debt (functions longer than 3000 lines with 60 parameters!) that every small changes requires so much time.
We're slowly killing (i.e. no big new developments, but only maintenance for existing customers) and abandoning it. And luckily we're not rewriting it. :-)
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#33Knight Capital lost $465 million in 45 minutes caused (at least in part) by technical debt and poor development practices.
Summary: http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lo...
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#34I worked for a startup that had basically the right idea but proper execution took so long we ran out of runway. The first iteration of the product was built in an extremely haphazard, cowboy way - and took months, if not years, to refactor into something stable, usable and crash-proof. By the time the product was operational, the company was bankrupt. We simply hemorrhaged money until we bled to death.
As someone else pointed out - technological debt is not a cause per se; it's an indication of some deeper problem - usually of human, not technological, nature.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#35I worked for a startup that had basically the right idea but proper execution took so long we ran out of runway. The first iteration of the product was built in an extremely haphazard, cowboy way - and took months, if not years, to refactor into something stable, usable and crash-proof. By the time the product was operational, the company was bankrupt. We simply hemorrhaged money until we bled to death. As someone el…
That may be a 'startup problem'. Do it cheap and coyboy because, runway. Assuming the money will come along later to do it all again. But that happens (lots of money later) only if you get bought out. Not if you have to make it on your own.
So any business plan that includes the steps "A miracle occurs" and then "We get bought out" is probably going to suffer that fate?
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#36several start-ups folded on me, perhaps this was the most flagrant technical debt among them: Octek [then Octek-Foxboro, then shuttered ] was state of the art machine vision in 1980 but stuck with PDP-ll bus+boards in a box instead of investing in microprocessor single board systems and stuck with an odd-ball interpreted language "Magic-L". By 1986 they got run over by competitors with much lower price points and higher inspection rates. I could still make the boxes do the job but it was boutique stuff by then.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#37Yes 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 it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#38ITA software is a good example of a company that succeeded due to the collective technical debt across their competitors. Though they only really succeeded on the shopping part. They didn't ever get to a credible booking engine that anyone would buy. Which may point to something other than tech debt being the biggest barrier to modernizing an airline reservation system.
I'm not quite sure that's correct. ITA was ultimately bought by Google, and their booking engine was used in Expedia and Travelocity, IIRC.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#39Knight Capital lost $465 million in 45 minutes caused (at least in part) by technical debt and poor development practices. Summary: http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lo...
Wow.
"The consequences of the failures were substantial. For the 212 incoming parent orders that were processed by the defective Power Peg code, SMARS sent millions of child orders, resulting in 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares in approximately 45 minutes. Knight inadvertently assumed an approximately $3.5 billion net long position in 80 stocks and an approximately $3.15 billion net short position in 74 stocks. Ultimately, Knight realized a $460 million loss on these positions. "
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
#40ITA software is a good example of a company that succeeded due to the collective technical debt across their competitors. Though they only really succeeded on the shopping part. They didn't ever get to a credible booking engine that anyone would buy. Which may point to something other than tech debt being the biggest barrier to modernizing an airline reservation system.
I'm not quite sure that's correct. ITA was ultimately bought by Google, and their booking engine was used in Expedia and Travelocity, IIRC.
Their shopping/pricing engine was used in those two companies as well as others. It was wildy successful, but...you shop on ITA, and book elsewhere.
A booking engine (CRS/GDS) would be used by either airlines or a reservations system (Amadeus, Sabre, etc). That's the piece they didn't deliver on.
Edit: Reference to the announcement of abandoning the booking space: https://skift.com/2013/05/15/google-and-ita-software-abandon...
"This is indeed a bitter pill for ITA Software’s founders to swallow as they put years and millions of dollars into their dream to transform the nuts and bolts of the way airline reservations systems...are handled"