In All Tech Debt is NOT Created Equal, Joy Ebertz pushes back on the reflex to fix every piece of tech debt we encounter. The core argument: at the end of the day, we are trying to support and advance a business, not write the most elegant software ever. The existence of debt is not, on its own, a reason to pay it down.
Joy describes a familiar arc for engineers: junior devs ship quickly and write fragile code, get feedback, and then overcorrect into perfectionism. The fix isn’t more rigor, it’s better prioritization. She points to a practice from a previous role that she initially dismissed as bureaucracy: writing a business case for each proposed tech debt project. In hindsight, she found it valuable precisely because it forced engineers to articulate why a specific piece of debt was worth fixing, and what the cost of leaving it alone actually was.
The takeaway that lands for me: “sometimes worse is better, and sometimes downright bad is actually the right answer.” Read the full post on Medium.