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Comment by bigfishrunning | Hacker News Reader

> It's not about what the customer complains or notices at short term, is about having a quality system that can be augmented without accumulating same kind of debt.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, but convincing nontechnical management of this fact has been extremely difficult. It was hard in the days of the stackoverflow copy-paste monkeys, and it's even harder in the age of LLMs.

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Some people cannot be convinced of this, but some can, as long as you don't use technical language to describe the issue. Essentially, instead of saying "we need to prevent technical debt and have a maintainable software architecture" one needs to say stuff like "software quality enables a faster time-to-market for new features and less customer churn". i.e. put it in business-y terms.

Yes, but then it's really important to demonstrate that this is true. If they invest in what you propose, time to market for new features needs to actually become faster, or customer churn needs to actually decrease. It's not enough to put the proposal in business-y terms, it has to actually effect the claimed improvements to the business.

You have to pick metrics to show management that they understand the importance of, and then be able to demonstrate degradation in those metrics when you don't do what you propose, and improvements when you do. Accomplish this and you'll build trust.

Too often, what happens is that the proposed benefit is vague and not empirical, and then the benefit is not actually realized by a large investment into it, destroying trust.

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