Complaining about technical debt complaints is an easy way to potentially bias oneself against recognizing real issues before it is too late and everything is on fire all the time. Be wary of any such blanket assumptions in engineering.
I'm lead engineer on my startup's project, not the CTO but reporting directly to him. Team of about 30.
There are of course many legitimate things that can be described as tech debt, files that got too large and convoluted over many patches by many people, that sort of thing. But I find I have to watch out for the concept of "tech debt" because a few engineers will abuse it if given the chance.
For instance they will insist that code that was just written fresh by a colleague is "tech debt" because they would personally have written it differently, when there are no meaningful differences between the two approaches.
They can claim that a design they don't understand the reasons for immediately (regardless of whether it's documented) is tech debt.
They can claim any feature they don't personally want to do or which is perceived as hard work will create tech debt. And so on.
I wrote the initial code and I'm close enough to the codebase still to be able to fairly thoroughly examine claims of tech debt. I'd say most such claims are actually not a big deal and do not justify any non-trivial investments of time to resolve.
Moreover the sort of engineers who pay down more than their fair share of legitimate tech debt are invariably the ones who complain about it the least.
I'll upvote it as well, as it is possibly the thing with the least amount of intelligence that I've read so far in my life.
I've been on the other side of this. I was developing the frontend part to a series of http endpoints and my colleague was working on the http endpoints. He was creating some terrible code but I had no power at the time. When he was done, the code was functional, had various bug and a new feature was needed. I spent a week studying the code and managed to add a feature, which however was buggy due to how the code was written originally. I fixed all the bugs, and ended up totalling 4 weeks of work. This colleague was let go after this due to a series of circumstances, so I became the owner of the code. Then a new feature needed to be added but to do that i'd need to change various things in such code. Two weeks in, I still wasn't done. At some point I asked to be able to rewrite the code. I did, it took 2 weeks and was able to add the feature easily. I'm no genius but code that cripples you down from the get-go is tech debt. Tech debt is failure in software design, which ends up in unmaintainable code. I'd listen to anyone pointing at tech debt in my code, it means my code sucks, I made a big professional mistake and I need to correct it.
There is also voluntarily added tech debt, that's the one added by taking shortcuts. As long as you don't build new features on top of it, you are good.
> For instance they will insist that code that was just written fresh by a colleague is "tech debt" because they would personally have written it differently, when there are no meaningful differences between the two approaches.
> They can claim that a design they don't understand the reasons for immediately (regardless of whether it's documented) is tech debt.
> They can claim any feature they don't personally want to do or which is perceived as hard work will create tech debt. And so on.
It's never the new feature that's the problem. If the new feature can't be added in a good way, it's the old codebase that has unhandled technical debt.
Edit: Is saying "bad design" or "ineffective design" going to lead to some fearful confrontation?
Is it obvious to you that it's not just me?
Where would you substitute "bad design" or "ineffective design" into the comment?
Perhaps this will help: http://wiki.c2.com/?TechnicalDebt
> Perhaps this will help: http://wiki.c2.com/?TechnicalDebt
Seriously, it won't. That's the point. People overload these words. It's a cute ideal definition though.
Over and out.
P.S. Yeah, go ahead and downvote me, troll.
Edit: I apologize for beating a dead horse.
It's not about that either ... it's about things that were put off, generally for valid reasons at the time.
> It's never the new feature that's the problem.
What do you mean by "problem"? Many new features are inherently problematic.
> If the new feature can't be added in a good way, it's the old codebase that has unhandled technical debt.
That would only apply to waterfall development with infinite foresight. In the real world, wise people employ the YAGNI principle.
Oh really? I recently contracted with an industrial firm where most of the programming staff copy and paste at the drop of the hat and have no idea what DRY is, and think that technical debt and refactoring are some fancy university CS theory that "practical" programmers like them have no use for. I explained to the manager at some length the development and maintenance costs of the massive technical debt of their 30 year old code base, while at the same time I tried to reduce it a bit with every submit.
I think your situation sounds a bit different, where the manager either isn't very technical or isn't technical enough. Otherwise they'd be able to see the problem for themselves.
What I'm talking about are employees who have managers who understand the value of refactoring. What I find is that the people who get stuck in and most unambiguously improve hairy bits of the code (with full support of management) are usually not the ones who complain loudly and publicly about tech debt.
Speaking as a manager for a sec here, what I'd watch out for in your case is to not be seen too much as a complainer. Rather than say "this codebase is shit why does nobody care" look at it as, "hey guys! why not come to my interesting 10 minute lightning talk on my favourite refactoring technique" and maybe don't phrase it as about tech debt if they aren't responsive to that kind of analogy.
Managers in particular probably know their codebase is shit even if they aren't very technical, but labelling things as "tech debt" is always tricky because it's entirely possible that the debt was created by colleagues or those very same managers themselves, and whilst financial debt is well defined and measurable, tech debt is just an analogy. They may not even agree that any given bit of code is a problem.
Even if so, that's not relevant; you said that people like me "invariably" don't exist.
> where the manager either isn't very technical or isn't technical enough. Otherwise they'd be able to see the problem for themselves.
No, that's entirely wrong. As I clearly stated, it's the programming staff who can't see the problem. They are the people who never complain about technical debt while also never reducing it, contrary to your statement. That's the point, and your "good for you" is point-missingly dismissive.
> Speaking as a manager for a sec here
Just don't; I've been developing software since 1965 and I don't need your lectures (which are based on a complete lack of knowledge and erroneous assumptions about the software manager at that firm and my relationship and interactions with him), I simply pointed out that your sweeping generalization about who reduces technical debt and who points it out is erroneous. That's all. Period. The end. I won't respond further.
Would you agree that we should think about specific issues that are slowing us down, and fix them one by one, starting from the worst ones?
(worst in sense of biggest slowdown/pain levels)
Blanket painting of a class of complaints doesn't help them or you accomplish business objectives better long term.
Most complaints about tech debt are not worth actioning, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to all of them and try to filter the signal from the noise.