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We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

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Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#21

Post by marginalia_nu »

adrianN wrote: post #3

Technical debt and its costs are extremely hard to quantify and saying things like "with 3-6 weeks of engineering time we can cut failures in half" is just inventing numbers to get what you want.

I get that a lot of people in IT are very facts-focused, but if you want to actually convince people that they need to act in some fashion, you need to add some emotional weight to your arguments (pulling numbers out of your ass is one way of doing that).

Admit it or not, the reason you want the technical debt addressed is primarily emotional. You are frustrated with how difficult it is to work, you fear for the future of the project. If you want to compel someone in charge to make changes, you need to make them feel things are bad as well.

This is to be used responsibly, though. If it turns out you've convinced someone into acting in a way that is against their interest or a big waste of time, there will probably be blowback later.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#22

Post by amznbyebyebye »

One trick we use is to just bake it in as part of a new medium to large size feature. Or if product is swamped with stakeholder management related stuff, we leave a gap sprint for all these tech debt related things. Another thing we do is have a dedicated platform team whose main charter is to work on general improvements inclusive of tech debt reduction.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#23

Post by EugeneOZ »

Tretio wrote: post #19

Stop talking to business about technical debt. Stop creating technical debt. No one ever asked me why in particular something took 3 days. I don't explain to someone that I wrote unit tests and no manager told me not to write tests. Did you ever got chewed out by a manager looking through your git commits and asking you why you wrote it as it is written? If you accept technical debt it's the development teams fault.…

Sorry, but how old are you? Add the line “stop creating bugs” into this text to make it complete.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#24

Post by samhw »

Tretio wrote: post #19

Stop talking to business about technical debt. Stop creating technical debt. No one ever asked me why in particular something took 3 days. I don't explain to someone that I wrote unit tests and no manager told me not to write tests. Did you ever got chewed out by a manager looking through your git commits and asking you why you wrote it as it is written? If you accept technical debt it's the development teams fault.…

The point of technical debt is that you don't want to invest an amount of time appropriate for [long-term business-critical feature which will be built upon] into something which is currently [basic experimental feature which may well be ditched].

When the latter is validated and becomes the former, that's when - and why - you repay your tech debt.

A team that builds everything as though it were a business-critical feature, which needs to be architected as safely as the control loop on a rocket, is a business which is pathologically unable to experiment and iterate.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#25

Post by mberning »

You have to tie it to something they want or need.

They “need” to be on the latest version -> upgrading versions takes a long time and is prone to error -> the process would be infinitely easier with a robust test suite -> we never prioritized automated testing which is a tech debt which we are now paying interest on in the form of being on extremely old versions of a product.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#26

Post by Gupie »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #18

This article seemed pretty incoherent: > Companies and business leaders don’t care if jobs are hard or annoying or take longer than they “should”. The difference between a user story taking a day or 3 days is negligible compared to its business value. And then literally two sentences later: > They care about time to market.

The first is in regards medium/long term maintenance. Whereas time to market usually refers to the first version of a product.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#27

Post by thinkharderdev »

willis936 wrote: post #4
k__ wrote: post #2

Usually, the discussion goes the other way around. Product is pissed because delivery is stagnated and that's because of technical debt. Product: We need that change for Big Co. Techie: Okay, that takes two weeks. Product: Two weeks? For such a small change?? Techie: Yes, because we are drowing in technical debt and you're priorizing features and not maintanence. Also, usually techies don't care. Why? Because it's al…

Features have a lot of development advantages over maintenance. Features are fun and rewarding to implement. Maintenance is boring. This seems small, but it's actually huge. Feature work can be done many times faster because of it. I got hired at my current job because people left because the feature phase was over and they didn't want to do maintenance. I'm probably going to leave because this work is simply not int…

I agree. I think people on HN generally underestimate the extent to which developers themselves push to work on new features instead of maintenance. It's often a different kind of feature though. I can't count how many times in my career devs (including me!) instantly jumped to "we need to rewrite X using new framework Y" in response to technical debt in X.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#28

Post by muzani »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #8

Usually it's hard to quantify technical debt. And anyway, when debt is first accumulated, it has no downsides. When you first take out a loan, you don't pay anything for the first month. Without understanding the long term nature of debt and interest, you will see it as free money. Business leaders have wisely learned how finances work, and financial debt. We need to learn how software engineering works, and technica…

That's exactly how startups think, though. The king raises an army to conquer rich lands and pay off debt. The founder makes hacky products, to get users, then raises money to hire engineers.

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#29

Post by chrisweekly »

Tretio wrote: post #19

Stop talking to business about technical debt. Stop creating technical debt. No one ever asked me why in particular something took 3 days. I don't explain to someone that I wrote unit tests and no manager told me not to write tests. Did you ever got chewed out by a manager looking through your git commits and asking you why you wrote it as it is written? If you accept technical debt it's the development teams fault.…

Agreed. But what is "Mh"?

Re: We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

#30

Post by hobs »

People saying "its on you" and "has your boss ever reviewed the code?" have not had varied enough experiences.

Ever had your boss tell you a feature needs to be delivered next week or the business closes? Or that you're fired?

I have in fact had my commits gleaned by my boss, told me "no, we're not shipping these 10 lines of code because that goes too far and not what I asked" and then refused to accept the pull request because he had control.

Just because YOU have never been in a situation where YOU didn't have control over the creation of technical debt doesn't mean its just some magical thing you can fix and change by saying the right words, don't be naive.

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