It has a long story and a lot of better explanations, but in short
- Some character has a problem;
- They find a short-term solution;
- It later becames unsufficient, and then a problem for them and others.
Supernatural’s whole story arc was based on this (and it worked for them). Inevitably, to beat this big bad that the brothers have absolutely no business going toe-to-toe with, they must do something that is bound to catch up with them, but it’s either that or the world is fucked. Then the next thing is even worse, and they have to do something that will bite them even worse in order to stop the world from getting fucked. And it just keeps ramping up, they keep losing more and more of themselves and punching so far above their weight class that they end up… well, no spoilers, in case somebody wants to watch (and I don’t know how to do spoiler tags).
There’s a point when Sam has some injury, like a broken arm or gunshot wound or something, and he’s talking to a nurse or doctor who asks him to rate his pain from 0, which is no pain, to 10, which is the worst pain he could imagine. He gets a thousand-yard stare for a second and says “3.”
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
I actually had to realize this because I kept making “good enough” solutions that I told myself I would change later and then never did, until I got so frustrated that it made me stop working on it. Good enough is a big problem if it’s good enough that you never really need to change it.
Me playing factorio
Me playing Satisfactory
I was thinking more about selling a soul to some monkey-paw style demon, but yeah, there I feel seen.
Me playing Mindustry
Me
sandustry ˢᵒᵒⁿ
Me looking at the codebase of my new team.
hi-quality shower thought
In a way it’s the plot of Hollow Knight.
Dark Souls as well.
It’s a fancier way of saying “quick and dirty”. Couldn’t be bothered to build a proper fix, so I simply went with whatever trashy hack that just barely gets the job done.
Quite often (or maybe even most often), but there’s also the realities of simply having to choose a path knowing it will change in 2-5 years.
I’ve seen that first hand. Workers keep complaining how badly the engineers designed some machine. When I talked to the engineer who designed it, he told me it was fine 10 years ago, but many things have changed since then. Nowadays, the machine is sitting in a place where it wasn’t designed to sit and it’s doing things it wasn’t designed to do.
It’s not anything close to “debt” though, fucking moronic IT jargon. It’s probably more like maintenance opex that someone doesn’t want to bother with. Or an old standard that someone doesn’t know how to comply with or doesn’t want to because they heard that the new one is “better”.
Neglectful asset management and poor maintenance is not going to force anyone into involuntary liquidation. That’s always a matter between the borrower and the lender. In the scenario above you have to borrow money at step 1, then suffer a revenue loss at step 3 before the loan was paid off.
I like to call it “debt”, because it’s a problem that grows while you ignore it. Worst case, it becomes easier to start over than fixing it. But getting 100% rid of it isn’t good business either.
Like all other analogies, don’t overthink it. I don’t now what “involuntary liquidation” would mean for tech debt. Unless you mean the product won’t run for a significant amount of time due to overwhelming tech debt, which can absolutely happen.
Yes and with the ‘debt’ analogy one can think of what debt is high interest vs low interest and work on the high interest items first
I agree. I don’t know the origin of the term, and whether or not this is all great post rationalization or if it was intended from the start, but these are exactly the reasons I think it’s a very good analogy.
ok, let me know when the bailiffs come round and start repossessing homes whose owners didn’t service their ‘technical debt’.
You cannot “ignore debt” or prioritize one debt-service-obligation over another; it is an obligation to repay, you go bankrupt or get liquidated if you do not service all of it, that’s it.
People like to use debt as a metaphor because of the serious and very real consequences of failing to make repayments. From a corpo perspective the difference between debt vs equity difference is so important essentially because of the legal standing of the creditors. That’s why you must service debt before profits, and even any elective opex.
When people (incompetent IT morons) use that phrase at my work, it has nothing to dop with any of that. They use it as a phrase to ignore critical maintenandebtce. and the consequences are higher opex in future, not insolvency or total failure. The people who lose out have no standing and no legal recourse. It’s far closer to paying dividend to equity (or not in this case) - if the profits aren’t there there’s nothing the equity holders can really do to force a dividend.
You lost me at “bailiff”. You are overthinking the analogy.
I see why you want to avoid the word at YOUR workplace. But the problem is your workplace, not the word.
I’ve worked at least 5 different places where they use this shitty jargon.
You still can’t blame the word.
It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.
