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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by theptip on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @11:34AM (#16585475)
Agree with all of this -- I'd just like to add that I think there's a second order point here that doesn't get much discussion; technical debt is often considered as something that's always bad, but sometimes the correct decision is to trim "quality" (from your trifecta) and get something out to the market faster.

I think that the debt analogy is a sound one; if you are buried under credit card debt then you might not even be able to make the interest payments. But if you take on debt in a considered and thoughtful fashion, then you can achieve things you wouldn't otherwise be able to do (e.g. buy a house, in the debt analogy). I have found that the debt analogy is very useful for communicating these tradeoffs to the business stakeholders.

So sometimes it actually is reasonable for the stakeholders to request you to compress the timeline on a sequence of features, if there's an external deadline that must be hit; we just have to make sure we get buy-in to come back and repay our debts (preferably immediately after the deadline).

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