Do this repeatedly and it really starts to add up. At times we are running 3-4 platforms for the same thing. Two are legacy with one or two critical things still running on them with no support. One is “production”, but no one is actually paying much attention to it. And one is in development or pilot… it’s all anyone can talk about, but it doesn’t actually work. While that in-house developed pilot is going on, we’ll also be told to do a POC with a tool from some outside vendors.
AI won’t solve political and bureaucratic problems. If anything, it will make it worse, as turnover to new products is expected faster.
To get rid of technical debt, an organization needs to focus. Which means saying “no” to most things, instead of trying to do it all.
I know it's cliche to say it, but most of the tech debt I've seen is on the frontend.
Most backends are relatively simple. Just a DB with lots of code wrapping it. But even the worst backends are relatively simple beasts. Just lots of cronjobs and lots of procedural code. While the code is garbage, it can be understood eventually. The backend is mature... even the tech debt on the backend is a known quantity!
But the frontend... damn the complexity and the over engineering are something unique. I think there is a fetish among frontend developers to make things as complicated as possible. Packages galore and SO MANY COMPONENTS.
As soon as people start inventing their own design system, UI framework, and sub packages I think the frontend is doomed for that project.
Sometimes the tech debt is that BE can't pass this data all at once yet. Fine. Let's fetch it.
But then FE gets creative. We can reduce nesting. We can chain it. We can preload stuff before the data loads. Instead of polling, let's do observers. Actually these aren't thread safe. And you know what, nothing should be in the UI thread because they'll cause delays. And this code isn't clean, one function should do only one thing.
Actually why are these screens even connected? We should use global variables and go to any screen from anywhere. Actually everything can be global. But global is an anti-pattern. So let's call it DI and single page application and have everything shared but everything must also be a singleton because shared immutability is bad too.
This is compounded when people come and go. The software/tech industry, in my experience, does not encourage long tenure – layoffs, reorgs, and the general trend of people hopping between employers every 2-3 years.
Startups also love the idea of building things fast and ugly, and 5 years later that leaves the company with a successful product (hopefully), a team that's grown fast (and turned over multiple times), and a shaky foundation.
Engineering generally seems open to paying down tech debt, but there's an overwhelming amount of it sometimes, and someone needs to deeply understand the problem and lay out a clear plan for taking care of it, and that takes serious effort.
If you have one person who owns an area/domain it tends to stay pretty clean.
But as soon as you add more people it becomes patchwork of differing approaches
It’s one of the reasons why projects built by just one or two people rarely have the kinds of tech debt you’ll find on large teams.
"This data in sheets X,Y,Z is all the same, can we make it a named range and make all the cells that need it refer to it directly?"
"No, like this you check that you put it correctly"
I've seen a sheet that was responsible for millions of dollars in revenue where in order for the formulas to work you had to manually adjust 10 cells once you added a line because it was all stuff like "$A$20:$A$458" instead of, you know, referring to a column in a named table.