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How to explain Technical Debt to your Boss
(feddit.org)
Hey Boss, look here!
I made a magical X-ray app that displays our code as wiring.
Here is the shiny, neat program that Bob wrote 15 years ago, right before he left us:
And here is what it is today, after Tom took it from Bob, and Jane from Tom, and Mick from Jane, and me from him, porting it to roughly four new platforms, and adding about 240 features from customer requests (150 of which were urgent):
i had the explaine this to my project manager. how are you going to have all our project completed by the skin of our teeth after mandatory overtime, over and over again, and not convince the client to pay for a refactor, AND not calculate a stacking buffer for project complete times? the tech debt will be paid, he has to choose the terms before it’s chosen for him
If "mandatory overtime" is needed outside the realm of multiple catastrophic surprise events on a company-ending scale, your "project manager" is absolute shit.
Overpromise, underdeliver. Looks good from my house!