But they don't care - instead, they just start a new one and repeat the process all over again.
The mistake here - made not just by the devs complaining about tech debt, but also by all of the company's customers - is that the goal is to produce something of value. It's not. It's to produce something promising to be of value at some point in the future, getting as many people as possible, as fast as possible, to buy into that promise (and stringing the paying users, if any, along for as long as possible), and then jettisoning the whole thing once it's past its peak, escaping with riches, to do it all again, or finally go FIRE.
Yep exactly my experience working in a startup. When it was time to make a real product our of the shit spaghetti code they wrote to win customers with """working""" demos, it was too late. Bankruptcy followed.
Isn’t this a slightly different problem? The product built was just vapourware and not really doing the job. So customers went elsewhere when the real version didn’t appear in time? Often companies will win the customers with a genuine working product but complicated code and then hire like crazy and all the new developers struggle and want to rewrite it all. But they mustn’t because it is a working product earning money. So gradual improvement and controlled rewrites of sub areas that need to change the most are focused on to succeed. If a company has gone bankrupt because of spaghetti code of a demo product, it feels to me like the problem was the product being just a demo rather than it being spaghetti code?
TeMPOraL|2 years ago
The mistake here - made not just by the devs complaining about tech debt, but also by all of the company's customers - is that the goal is to produce something of value. It's not. It's to produce something promising to be of value at some point in the future, getting as many people as possible, as fast as possible, to buy into that promise (and stringing the paying users, if any, along for as long as possible), and then jettisoning the whole thing once it's past its peak, escaping with riches, to do it all again, or finally go FIRE.
phito|2 years ago
majikandy|2 years ago