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Discussion on: What's your worst technical debt story?

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soundstruck profile image
Dina Gathe • Edited

Oh man, are you sure we don't work at the same place? ;-)

I work with most of the above issues (10+ year old monolith), along with hard-coded values that get forgotten in some old dusty corner of the codebase and cause bugs without generating any actual errors!

In our case, management are all non-technical and don't really understand the difference or the business value in good code vs. bad code, or tech debt or any of it, really. And in many ways, that old code worked and got them to this point...but at some point you do start to pay the price.

The monolith lives on.

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas • Edited

I guess I'm not the only one crying about issues we have!

Technical debt is just like a loan. You have to pay every month for it, at the end of your month you didn't really earn anything but you're in a much better shape.

During these few years I've realized that it's difficult to sell this kind of work for management, but it's possible, you just have to learn to speak their language:

  • Shorter development cycles
  • Less bugs
  • Faster deployment times
  • Possible infrastructure savings
  • Ability to ship new features faster
  • etc.