You can ignore it, tie it to unrelated company initiatives, or feign ignorance and simply not offer solutions that add to it. Or… you can adopt more above-board techniques such as Crawl/Walk/Run and the Reverse Farmer’s Rule, which reframe projects so that confronting tech debt is an upfront part of the plan.
I work for the absolute LAZIEST engineering manager I have ever known right now. Like dude has Ages of Empires open on his desktop all day at work. He is last remaining engineer from a team long ago that created the wireless technology that put us on the map. This was maybe 15 yrs ago, he was obviously the dumbest member of that team because he is secretly hiding the fact that he can no longer get the original source code to compile and he is slowly running out of ways to bullshit around it. We are now owned by a VC so upper management could not care less, but this guy creates tech debt out the wazoo! Him and the 20 yr old EE make changes to firmware, PCBs, mechanical designs CONSTANTLY and dont document any of it. it is crazy. They break production all the time. Nothing is documented, basic assembly, programming and test documentation for production is a decade old, if it even exists. They just do not give a shit, the engineering manager is already checked out, and his protege has never even seen what a good company looks like, or what engineering design control is. I feel really bad for whatever company gets suckered into buying us as that is the only concern of the VC, cut costs (primarily labor by laying a bunch of people off) as much as possible to make the company look good. Whoever buys us is going to be in for huge surprise! lolol
Technical debt is very real and can complete fuck companies.
Yeah, you should look for other opportunities btw, at least as a plan B.
lol sorry for you, how do you cope working in that environment?
They pay me well, I get to work on things I enjoy and my boss doesn’t actually manage anything so I can kind just do my thing and no one bothers me. Not sure how solvent the company will be so I’m just riding it for now. But it sucks. I fucking hate my boss, not to mention he is magat asshole.
Staying is more fun than interviewing.
Even though the situation you described is unfortunate, I don’t think it has any relationship with the concept of technical debt.
The term “technical debt” conveys the idea that a resource is invested in a way that requires to be repaid later. The whole concept revolves around the idea that taking shortcuts doesn’t eliminate the need to actually do the work to make things then right way. Rushing to a deliverable can leave a mess in your wake, but cleaning up that mess is also work that needs to be done and doesn’t magically go away.
It is the VERY CONCEPT of technical debt! Shortcut after shortcut shortcut… The company is literally shortcuts all the way down. No left at the company even knows how to work the erp properly. Because the person who set it up and customized it didn’t document or train anyone and then left… Technical debt. How about the mountain of product SKUs that were forced out the door never properly tested, filled with bugs and zero documentation… Left of the next guy… Technical debt. What about all those products not having real assembly or test documents and there being a literal single guy that knows how to test and program everything? No way to pass that info on besides a mountain of manufacturing engineering work? Technical debt.
What are you talking about dude!?!? Lolol.
That’s not technical debt. That isn’t even the definition of legacy code. That’s a mess and a whole set of problems, but technical debt ain’t one of it.
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To me it sounds like they took a lot of shortcuts and everyone from the team, barring the last engineer standing, were driven away by the looming Mount Debt