The title is misleading. It starts with the topic of technical debt, to conquer another issue which is performance. Now, I know that performance is important, but I'm looking for articles in technical debt. Give me the right title.
Technical debt may seem strange. It's not obvious at first, when you are young and adventurous. This is especially pronounced when you are selling products per license and guaranteeing free bugs fixing and some (even limited) support.
When I started, I didn't know it. I built the product and made the math of hours spent building, and hours to be spent on maintenance. It worked until I figured that my product was full of bugs, and I can't fix them but need to build it from top to bottom.
This is a technical debt. Because when your time is money, spending time on these issues (that ought to be fixed before selling) is like spending money. And it can get expensive to the point of shutting down the whole thing. Yes, you sell, you are profitable, you have zero costs (it's downloaded software) but you go bankrupt.
One quibble, spending time isn't "like" spending money, it is spending money. It costs money to make software because developers spend time working on software. Time = money = budget.
This seems straightforward and true, but in specific cases you should look deeper. A surprising number of software developers work unpaid overtime, and give their time to their employers for free. As well, the amount of producitivity that computers enable an individual to produce, when compared to how much the individual is paid for that, reduces time to being almost free.
If you only have to pay someone $20/hr, but every 400 hours or so they pop out some tiny bit of work that ends up being worth $500k in savings, you've only paid $8k for $500k profit. The 'cost' in terms of developer time is so stupendously cheap that worrying about wasting it is really a waste of effort.
Now, if developers realized the amount of money they save/made their company and they expected to be paid on the basis of THAT value, instead of simply settling for 'market rate' wages (which never take into account the actual value the position creates at any point), then it would make sense to worry about such things. But, developers, like most employees, are kept very ignorant of their impact to the company. Those who actually get to see their fiscal impact and who can't be lied to (top level managers, sales people) don't make market rate wages. It is their time you should be worrying about.
Technical debt may seem strange. It's not obvious at first, when you are young and adventurous. This is especially pronounced when you are selling products per license and guaranteeing free bugs fixing and some (even limited) support.
When I started, I didn't know it. I built the product and made the math of hours spent building, and hours to be spent on maintenance. It worked until I figured that my product was full of bugs, and I can't fix them but need to build it from top to bottom.
This is a technical debt. Because when your time is money, spending time on these issues (that ought to be fixed before selling) is like spending money. And it can get expensive to the point of shutting down the whole thing. Yes, you sell, you are profitable, you have zero costs (it's downloaded software) but you go bankrupt.