Comment on Technical debt is probably one of the best dramatic tropes
bryndos@fedia.io 4 months ago
It's not anything close to "debt" though, fucking moronic IT jargon.
It's probably more like maintenance opex that someone doesn't want to bother with. Or an old standard that someone doesn't know how to comply with or doesn't want to because they heard that the new one is "better".
Neglectful asset management and poor maintenance is not going to force anyone into involuntary liquidation. That's always a matter between the borrower and the lender. In the scenario above you have to borrow money at step 1, then suffer a revenue loss at step 3 before the loan was paid off.
I like to call it “debt”, because it’s a problem that grows while you ignore it. Worst case, it becomes easier to start over than fixing it. But getting 100% rid of it isn’t good business either.
Like all other analogies, don’t overthink it. I don’t now what “involuntary liquidation” would mean for tech debt. Unless you mean the product won’t run for a significant amount of time due to overwhelming tech debt, which can absolutely happen.
Yes and with the ‘debt’ analogy one can think of what debt is high interest vs low interest and work on the high interest items first
I agree. I don’t know the origin of the term, and whether or not this is all great post rationalization or if it was intended from the start, but these are exactly the reasons I think it’s a very good analogy.
ok, let me know when the bailiffs come round and start repossessing homes whose owners didn't service their 'technical debt'.
You cannot "ignore debt" or prioritize one debt-service-obligation over another; it is an obligation to repay, you go bankrupt or get liquidated if you do not service all of it, that's it.
People like to use debt as a metaphor because of the serious and very real consequences of failing to make repayments. From a corpo perspective the difference between debt vs equity difference is so important essentially because of the legal standing of the creditors. That's why you must service debt before profits, and even any elective opex.
When people (incompetent IT morons) use that phrase at my work, it has nothing to dop with any of that. They use it as a phrase to ignore critical maintenandebtce. and the consequences are higher opex in future, not insolvency or total failure. The people who lose out have no standing and no legal recourse. It's far closer to paying dividend to equity (or not in this case) - if the profits aren't there there's nothing the equity holders can really do to force a dividend.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 4 months ago
It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.