Re:Ask HN: How do you explain tech debt (to non-techs)?
by samstave on Saturday October 23, 2021 @03:54PM
(#28971671)
For me, technical debt is two things:
Deployed [infra/code/apps] for which few people have remaining context within the company for how those items designs were come about, dated information, SPOF that cant be easily addressed (like a mission critical machine running in a closet that has one-sh job, but can never go offline with causing issues...
And, having to dedicate time/effort/staff/your-own-personal-time+angst to maintain dated systems in a way that may not be efficient for the team/company financially, but you're beholden to it as you determine how to allocate staff who would be better at doing something else, but they need to create projects to manage/update/replace
Deployed [infra/code/apps] for which few people have remaining context within the company for how those items designs were come about, dated information, SPOF that cant be easily addressed (like a mission critical machine running in a closet that has one-sh job, but can never go offline with causing issues...
And, having to dedicate time/effort/staff/your-own-personal-time+angst to maintain dated systems in a way that may not be efficient for the team/company financially, but you're beholden to it as you determine how to allocate staff who would be better at doing something else, but they need to create projects to manage/update/replace