Comment by _def
4 hours ago
> Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates
How to do that? Genuine question.
4 hours ago
> Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates
How to do that? Genuine question.
If there's a legit, measurable performance or data integrity problem, start with that. If most of your production bugs come from a specific module or service, document it.
If it is only technical debt that is hard to understand or maintain, but otherwise works, you're going to have a tougher time of building a case unless you build a second, better version and show the differences. But you could collect other opinions and present that.
Ultimately you have to convince them to spend the time (aka money) on it and do it without making things worse and that is easiest to do with metrics instead of opinions
If it's been around for a while, look at the last year's worth of projects and estimate the total delay caused by the specific piece of tech debt. Go through old Jira tickets etc. and figure out which ones were affected.
You don't need to be anywhere close to exact, it's just helpful to know whether it costs more like 5 hours a year or 5 weeks a year. Then you can prioritize tech debt along with other projects.
It takes guts to say “this 1 month feature would be done in a couple days by a competent competitor using modern technology and techniques”, and the legendary “I reimplemented it in <framework> over the weekend” is often not well received.
But - sometimes drastic measures and hurt feeling are needed to break out of a bad attractor. Just be sure you’re OK with leaving the company/org if your play does not succeed.
And know that as the OP describes, it’s a lot about politics. If you convince management that there is a problem, you have severely undermined your technical leadership. Game out how that could unfold! In a small company maybe you can be the new TL, but probably don’t try to unseat the founder/CTO. In a big company you are unlikely to overturn many layers above you of technical leadership.
> hurt feeling
This is why I incessantly preach to my coworkers: "you are not your job". Do not attach to it emotionally, it's not your child, it's a contraption to solve a puzzle. It should be easy and relieving to scrap it in favor of a better contraption, or of not having to solve the problem at all.
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In my experience development has become too compartmentalized. This is why this game of telephone is so inefficient and frustrating just to implement basic features.
The rise of AI actually is also raising (from my observations) the engineer's role to be more of a product owner. I would highly suggest engineers learn basic UI/UX design principles and understand gherkin behavior scenarios as a way to outline or ideate features. It's not too hard to pick up if you've been a developer for awhile, but this is where we are headed.