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Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

Technical debt is a sensible strategy when you are a startup aiming for growth. If you become successful, you can hire enough developers to pay back the depth in due time. If you fail, the debt doesn't matter.

Take Facebook: They build an empire on PHP. Now they have built some clever compilers on top on PHP in order to make it safe and performant without breaking their existing piles of legacy code. Overall this is probably ridiculously inefficient compared to just using a safe and performant platform from the beginning. But using PHP in the beginning allowed them to move fast in the critical growth phase.

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I really struggle with the analogy of technical debt as equivalent to financial debt. The analogy works great in theory, but it doesn't translate to the real world. The technical decisions we make today will influence the decisions we make tomorrow, and the decisions we make tomorrow will influence the decisions we make next week... and so the system we have a year from now will be layers and layers of deeply interwoven technical debt that you can't just have your accountant pay off at the click of a button.

If we're married to the financial debt analogy, then technical debt has compounding interest like a payday loan... and payday loans are typically used in very distressed circumstances, and are very dangerous. There's appropriate times to take a payday loan, and there's appropriate times to take on technical debt, but it has to be handled with great care and be an immediate wake up call to address the underlying cause.

Yeah, compounding interest is part of the metaphor. As long as you grow faster than the compounding interests, you are good. If the options for a startup is the keep growing or die, then taking on technical debt is reasonable.

Of course it is different for a steady-state company or organization. You need to keep technical dept at a manageable level.

Some tech debt behaves like a payday loan with usurious compounding interest.

The more insidious kind behaves more like a completely unhedged call option - fine, until it very suddenly isn't.

The developers you hire may hate you for it, though. And won't stick around. That'll create churn that creates even more debt.

Does Facebook have problems recruiting?

I think all companies are having problems recruiting in the current environment. FB for a myriad of reasons.

>If you become successful, you can hire enough developers to pay back the depth in due time.

How many successful companies actually do this?

At one point in my career I transitioned from a startup to one that had been acquired some 12 years before, and found it to be even more chaotic than the startup. Instead of playing a frantic game of whack-a-mole with all the pivots and feature ideas of the founders, you had a few dozen teams playing whack-a-mole with the pet projects of their respective product managers who were trying to make a name for themselves. Which was much worse because you had to coordinate with every other of those teams, and of course work with all the integrations with the parent company.

Charitably speaking, maybe these older successful companies are bad simply because the field of software engineering was still too immature when they came about, and today's startups will actually pay back their debt when they become successful in the future. Sure, we have better tools now than then, but we still don't have a static analysis tool that can determine if we built the right or wrong thing for an ever changing market.

Sounds like a version of the mythical man month. Throwing 100 or 1000 developers at it will not reduce tech debt alone. It is probably harder to eliminate debt with more developers.

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