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This article sounds like somebody fed an LLM with the original report and asked for a summary for a tech article, and then added some human touches here and there.
ChatGPT loves using emojis in eactly this manner
Google is obscenely rich and can spend cycles doing this.
This is solid and necessary. The alternative to an objective measurement of debt is debt expressed in contempt. Even putting things in deep backlog to get commented on every couple months is better than letting these decisions on priority go completely unacknowledged.
Otherwise, even if people tackle the tech debt in good faith, they spend endless time polishing things that don't really matter. Something big like a database or API is deeply flawed, and they focus on improving the unit tests, which further entrenches the broken stuff because any replacement now has to meet the same standards.
Google may not be the best example. They seem to be poor at measuring and have high tech debt. As is evident by: - the decrease in quality of search - Poor response to SEO techniques (seems they embraced it...) - Decrease in spam filtering - I frequently get spam now. A fair number have crazy original messages that are pages long but display a single image in the main interface - Constant drops on projects that someo…
All of those things are real problems with Google, and its decisions, but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt. I suppose they _could_ be, but they could all have plenty of other causes, many of which seem more plausible to me. 1. Decreasing quality of search and poor SEO technique responses may be caused by technical debt, but they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money.…
Lol false. Google killed their internal culture which prioritized supporting and trusting engineers to do the right thing. They replaced them with grifters who would lie to management claiming they could measure technical debt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT loves using emojis in eactly this manner
Using emojis as bullet points has been a thing in tech articles since emojis were a thing, so if anything, ChatGPT loves using them like that because people love using them like that. (I.e., it's not a good litmus test for AI.)
I experienced awful tech debt combined with an hostage taker, meaning a guy who seemingly refrains from giving knowledge about the software or being able to make the project progress, which gives him eternal employment, while hardly helping his colleagues to get out of the situation. I wonder at what point a refactoring becomes just a waste of time and money compared to a slow rewrite. It becomes difficult to have an…
done.
extra, fire them before they take hostage the new system.
Google may not be the best example. They seem to be poor at measuring and have high tech debt. As is evident by: - the decrease in quality of search - Poor response to SEO techniques (seems they embraced it...) - Decrease in spam filtering - I frequently get spam now. A fair number have crazy original messages that are pages long but display a single image in the main interface - Constant drops on projects that someo…
All of those things are real problems with Google, and its decisions, but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt. I suppose they _could_ be, but they could all have plenty of other causes, many of which seem more plausible to me. 1. Decreasing quality of search and poor SEO technique responses may be caused by technical debt, but they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money.…
> but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt
> they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money. That isn't technical debt, that's enshittification for money.
> that's a bad product decision, not technical debt.
| technical debt refers to the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one.
- Wiki[0]
I experienced awful tech debt combined with an hostage taker, meaning a guy who seemingly refrains from giving knowledge about the software or being able to make the project progress, which gives him eternal employment, while hardly helping his colleagues to get out of the situation. I wonder at what point a refactoring becomes just a waste of time and money compared to a slow rewrite. It becomes difficult to have an…
That hostage taker needs a new plan because now LLMs can generate code docs.