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> Management only understands timely delivery.

as they should, because it's the only thing that matters to 99% of humans for any non-critical stuff (and honestly, even critical... even stuff that can kill humans, we are very good at saying "one chance of death in XXX is an acceptable risk" ; I'd wager that anything that is below the average death rate of car driving in a particular time / area is in general ok).

I'd rather learn a software that has bugs today than a perfect software in a year - by that time I've already organized my workflow around the bugs and already spent 1/30th of the time of my projected remaining future career around this software. I'm not going to re-learn yours even if it works better.



    as they should, because [timely delivery] is the 
    only thing that matters to 99% of humans for any 
    non-critical stuff 
Right, but here's the thing. Tech debt is inseparable from timely delivery.

The tech debt you accrue today in the name of "shipping fast" hurts your ability to execute timely delivery in the future.

That's why management should care.


or is it ? some code is made to be long-lasting (and that's the one we "see" because of course it lasted long already) but the large majority is short-term projects which are only relevant for a few months / years and will never get reused afterwards.


Hah, yeah, I think we haven't a terminology difference here. I wouldn't even term "bad" code in short-lived projects to be "tech debt" in the first place.

I definitely agree you about the near irrelevance of tech debt in short lived projects.

     the large majority is short-term projects which 
Is this really true? Really depends on where you work, I guess. It hasn't generally been my experience.

But it really depends on if you're working at e.g. an agency vs. working on long lived in house projects.




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