We (devs) sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt

(1) I despise the meme image. Memes as a communication form let both autists and neurotypicals pretend they are communicating but they are just a cancer.

(2) "Debt" is a bad term to use here because financial debt is a well-articulated concept that is surrounded by institutions for managing it such as credit reporting, financial reports, etc. In the case of "Technical Debt" people are just throwing it behind their ass and making no effort to account for it.

(3) Actually you can account for it. At one place I was at (as a dev) I was putting more tickets into the issue tracking than anybody else because I was putting in thin tickets about specific technical issues in the system. To push back against this they said "each ticket has to have some benefit for the customer". One of my complaints was "We have a 40 minute build process" and the benefit to the consumer of fixing that was "The customer would have had the product six months ago." When you quantify the impact of technical debt and other supply side issues it is easy to prove that a $3000 laptop pays for itself in a month and things like that. You just have to think quantitatively.

This one made me laugh: 'how quickly would the CFO get fired if they claimed “we have a lot of debt” but couldn’t produce a balance sheet'

> Companies and business leaders don’t care if jobs are hard or annoying or take longer than they “should”. The difference between a user story taking a day or 3 days is negligible compared to its business value. Companies and their leaders care about revenue and costs. They care about customers and growth. They care about time to market. If we want to have our non-technical colleagues listen and act, we need to either improve our use of the financial terms they understand or we need to translate our message into business outcomes that they do care about.

I confess, after many years, Im finding it pretty tiring working for businesses/people that dont have the capability to understand or assess. That we keep having people running the show who lack the faculty to understand how the meat is made, that are unfit to judge or assess the health of the company's output is wearisome.

This article is the hard truth of how to deal with the shitty situation almost everyone is in- us human resources, being tooled & wielded by a far off, distant, & unknowing managerial class. This article is great real talk, for techies.

But the absurdity & dissonance is not discussed here. The techhood are humams raised amid alien cultures, alien civilizations, dropped into even more particularly multi-alien kmany genrations of aliens) worlds/living systems. We are demanded of, commanded, directed by people unseeing, incapable of assessing. Even if they saw the sausage being made they'd have no comprehension, no context, be unable to share in what goes on. It is extremely hard being in this situation, being a developer, a guardian & worker of the vast technical machinery, each artifact (product) so unalike so unique so it's own thing, & having so few about who can share the commitment & obligation we feel to ourselves, to the product, to the company. The business world can feel so decoupled & unattached.

I have a theory that eventually personal computing will reemerge. That rather than the massified, hierachtical, top down services of today that produced highly synthesized business products, we might some day restart humamity's interest in computers as a free media, as more open ended & personally driven systems. One of the big gates to getting there is creation of technical works where the technics matter, where technical excellence & a softer more comfortable technical environment is itself a major selling point, a major feature, is less rebuffing & more explorable & well tended. Open systems, that are interesting & fun to engage in, is, in my view & hopes, a.path to technical accelerationism that will eventually help us power out of this rut, this dismaying local maxima of computing under the simplest mode, under consumerist-capitalism.

Im happy to read this article, framing the difficulty we face a bit more clearly, challenging us to do better. But I also wish I'd seen more of the world I'd joped for, the one where the rise of the geeks really happened. There are some rare places it's true, but the geeks & our visions being made vassals to business has for real happened, a case well made out in the book New Kingmakers[1]. I think, I hope better is possible, and that that other way could be enormously good for civilization as a whole, could be broadly reempowering & informing, help the world somewhat reground itself & enable it to work forwards with new cooperative & exploratory efficacy.

[1] https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/10/20/new-kingmakers-then-n...