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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

The parent is not referring to those needs (which are legitimate). The presentation talks a lot about the hacking culture; how there is a lot of duplicate code, a lot of dead code, a lot of "temporary" code.

We call these things technical debt. But it sounds like they just never fix them. Refactors never happen.

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Eventually you just hear "New version of our app rewritten from the ground up" when it all becomes one big pile of technical debt.

I sincerely doubt the fact that there are companies which thoroughly fix "technical debt".

They don't call it debt. It is simply their way of keeping their agility with a huge number of developers. If the flip side is junk that mostly impacts install space, I don't see it as a bad trade-off.

What alternative way would you suggest to keep your mega team productive and shipping features?

Hiring a team whose sole job description is garbage cleanup?

Productivity != Total Output.

You can't avoid fixing tech debt. Eventually it impedes your ability to be productive. It happens, to some degree, to every software project. Someone else joked about "we wrote the app from the ground up" but that really does happen. You're not "shipping features" if you're rewriting the app.

1. Having a core team who's job it is to maintain the app and clean up the debt.

2. I seriously have to question that they absolutely need that pace. I don't buy it for a second that any of this is necessary or better than the alternative.

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