What is the common thread among tech debt-crippled companies you've worked in? Not enough man hours to pay it down, difficulty to align engineering's willingness to pay it down with product's focus on new features, or something else? How can it be that, in the age of AI code gen, we haven't yet managed to solve this once and for all?
AI makes technical debt so much worse. Speaking from the frontend perspective- reducing technical debt is all about making changeable standardized code. However models change structure, variables names, or changing variables means I'm building a lot of frontend on a shaky foundation. I routinely spend hours a week just fixing weird frontend builds. And as I'm the frontend role, my cofounder doesn't understand design, so I often get messy code
A lot of tech debt I've seen stems from people tacking things onto a loose foundation – adding API endpoints when there's no clear pattern, adding validation or defaults in different ways, organizing layers of code in various ways, multiple implementations of the same business need.
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.
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.