I hope you’re able to find good managers. I prioritize paying down tech debt over feature development regularly, because it makes business sense.
Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident response, stability, customer trust, etc.
It doesn’t always; there are certainly areas of tech debt that bother me personally but I know aren’t worth the ROI to clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there’s a little friction.
How? I find it hard for my team to reduce tech debt as an OKR since other feature work is 1) sexier for engineers to work on 2) easier to put concrete value on. Everybody agrees in principle that tech debt is bad
Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it.
Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity.
Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review.
Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents.
Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy!
Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them.
Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs.
And then…
Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies.
So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?
Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident response, stability, customer trust, etc.
It doesn’t always; there are certainly areas of tech debt that bother me personally but I know aren’t worth the ROI to clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there’s a little friction.