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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of taking weeks or months to develop a custom application, it can be done in a few hours or days.

In other words, "pile up massive amounts of technical debt"

I mean, so what though? I feel like we complain about technical debt often without acknowledging that the point of taking on debt, traditionally, is to capture potential growth. Sure it'll be a hassle to be the guy who has to handle the eventual revamp, but that's just a reason for that guy to ask for more money. At the point of turning a week into hours you're playing a totally different game than you were before.

> that's just a reason for that guy to ask for more money.

It sounds like you're arguing that technical debt is no big deal because you can leave for greener pastures before the bill for that debt comes due. Am I misunderstanding you here?

That's a bit snarky.

I've been engineering software for a long time and I've never come across a code base (associated with a successful product) that was debt free.

Perhaps a bit snarky, but sincerely spoken.

This concept reminds me quite a bit of the "applications" I've seen floating around in big companies. They are creations of convenience, based on MS Office documents because there weren't any real programmers around. They may have been initially fine, but grow and grow until they are completely unwieldy. By that time they are critical path and mission critical, and nobody can handle the complexity.

Then that is a failure of management – that they didn't make the proper investments when the time came. It doesn't necessarily mean that taking on that debt early on didn't make sense.

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