Ian Potter
Alex RockProject manager: "What's technical debt? Explain it to me like I'm 6 years old"
Devs:
(source: "Richard Scarry's Storybook Dictionary" : https://archive.org/details/1scarryRichardStorybookDictionary/page/n56/mode/1up )
Andrew F.@pierstoval Gives me a new visual for when our CEO says "fix the roof while the sun is shining".
Fabian N. T.@pierstoval more like mental health problems, tbh
@fabian Well, could apply to both
PhDog 🇮🇪That's actually kinda spot on.
Ole Wolf@pierstoval Project managers be like: "Awesome! We can put the important servers under the hole so they get free air cooling."
always tiredEven better, water cooling!
dag@pierstoval then one day burglars came through the hole and killed him.
Spatz von Dresden@pierstoval "Instead of explaining to you what it is, I'll rather explain what it does: It'll kill your business. End of story."
@zilpzalp Haha, this part is when you introduce the concept. After that, all C*Os will want details about how it works and how it kills their company. That's where you bring the memes.
hamin@pierstoval Adding this to a customer presentation today...
Arnold S@pierstoval see also: climate change
@foreignfilm Can be applied to pretty much any field where upper management don't give a shit about listening to people who actually know their stuff
Aidan@pierstoval oh boy, you are getting printed out and stuck on a wall at work. I hope you're ok with that.
@allsumnull You can take the picture, you don't need tu point me. I don't know who made this drawing.
@pierstoval I see you've discovered it was a Richard Scarry. I already knew it was his, I'm a big fan of his stuff from when I read it as a kid. I just loved the analogy to technical debt. It is perfect!
Alex, the Hearth Fire@pierstoval @allsumnull it's from a Richard Scarry book, I recognize the style but don't remember who did the art
Cheerful Madness!! 🖤🩶🤍💜@pierstoval It looks like a Richard Scary’s illustration
Jerp@pierstoval Holy crap this is way too accurate.
Rob@pierstoval My PM says:
How can we move the house to a country that doesn't rain then?
Smol Entity@pierstoval while the image is funny, it's not really technical debt, it's just bad planning.
Technical debt is covering the hole with newspapers to keep out a drizzle, knowing full well it won't stop a rainstorm that will happen eventually
synlogic@smol_entity @pierstoval ^--- this guy gets it
trent@pierstoval I was on a team that kept ClearCase running. My co-worker said we were in technical debtors prison. He retired last year and I got reorg'ed into a different team... and am yet again maintaining a crumbling service that is critical infrastructure.
Ben@pierstoval that's great. Now explain sunk cost fallacy
@wolleysegap easy: same toot
Si 
(he/him)I always say:
It was called technical debt back then.
Now it's called financial risk.
We should estimate the cost of delay p.a. and the probability of occurance.
Bruno Nicoletti@sihaha @pierstoval That’s the first time I’ve ever heard technical debt described as financial risk, now I’ve heard that, it is of course blindingly obvious. A nice thing to throw back at software product managers who alway prioritise features over tech debt.
cmmdmx@pierstoval This is incredible.
David S (inactive)@pierstoval oh the irony. I'm sitting in an end of life meeting arguing why doing nothing is doing the wrong thing.
Jaycie@pierstoval Unholy bleeping bleep that spells it out so well.
@pierstoval yep the ideal tech debt is 0. but hard to reach and keep. typically it rises and drops overtime but is never zero. I think if a piece of software is still searching for PMF and 1st customer then keeping tech debt down is not as important. cuz any startup is "default dead" until/unless becomes $-sustainable. once the $ question is proven and steady paychecks are on the line THEN tech debt paydown becomes more wise
Matt Christensen@bbb_999 I’m saving this one for later
Billy O'Neal@pierstoval @anthonywilliams I don't think that this captures that it is more about making future modifications more difficult rather than a direct problem. A hole in a roof is a bug. Technical debt isn't a bug, but it can make avoiding bugs more costly.
I think a better ELI5 would be "technical debt is like buying cheap scissors. They're cheaper, and they might *work*, but they're going to make building your next arts and crafts project more difficult"
Anthony WilliamsTrue. Originally Technical Debt was about making a choice to do something cheaper/less well now for some benefit (e.g. time to market), and defer the cost of that until later.
These days it is often used to mean something that is less than ideal about the current codebase, so a leaky roof could be a more reasonable analogy.
I like the cheap scissors idea though
@anthonywilliams @pierstoval A leaky roof is a suboptimal thing but it's also customer facing, and technical debt isn't.
How about something like a fleet of unreliable delivery vans. The folks doing the deliveries are going to have to move things around more to transfer into working ones when something breaks but the packages can still get delivered on time.
Darwin Woodka
James Wells@anthonywilliams
It isn't always about doing something cheaper/faster. It is often about aging out technologies. For example moving from PHP 5 to PHP 7 or moving from MySQL 5 to MySQL 6. Technical debt comes in many flavors and starts as soon as you "release"
@nikatjef I'm not sure I like this analogy because that's more akin to "maintenance" rather than "debt". In particular debt is normally explicitly entered into by the debtor but you don't ask for maintenance.
Of course should one explicitly choose to defer that maintenance then it could become debt, but there are a lot of things in the world that are old and are just never edited again, and the existence of other things becoming newer around those things doesn't magically make them have debt.
stilescrisis@malwareminigun @nikatjef Software is "finished" the same way a lawn is "mowed." Upkeep is not optional.
Unprecedented 2023
Macer@pierstoval 🤣 perfect explanation.
Annamal@pierstoval this is perfect
demofox@pierstoval I love that "project managers" don't know what technical debt is. How are they qualified to manage the peoject?
Wayne Young@demofox @pierstoval You can know what technical debt is, without ever having heard the phrase "technical debt" 😉
Niclas HedhmanBrilliant!
GeoffreyWinn@pierstoval I still do not know what technical debt is. It is because I’m not very smart.
@GeoffreyWinn maybe you just don't work in the tech industry, no lack of smartness in that
@pierstoval Well if you say so.
@GeoffreyWinn I mean, I don't know, do you work in the tech industry?
@pierstoval No, I don’t think so.
@GeoffreyWinn Do you want some explanations on the meme? It might be less funny afterwards, but at least you'll get it
@pierstoval Hm, that sounds good. I do like a good explanation.
@GeoffreyWinn Simple format: technical debt is the amount of undocumented, complex, hard-to-maintain code or software architecture that developers put in their projects, and if they ever leave, all of that is lost and the remaining devs (or the upcoming ones) will not know what to do with it.
If they touch it, it has high risk of breaking, and if they don't, it then won't be possible to optimize or enhance it.
Since it's tech-related, and hard to recover, that's why it's called "technical debt".
If they touch it, it has high risk of breaking, and if they don't, it then won't be possible to optimize or enhance it.
Since it's tech-related, and hard to recover, that's why it's called "technical debt".
@GeoffreyWinn Hope this suits you 👌