Title: _or as a person in a CTO-like role_<p>Ah, the technical debt.<p>While the concept is sweet from the business perspective, the result of leveraging technical debt, most often, is a big mess.<p>The technical debt is accruing every week, after each iteration, sprint, what have you. Your developers are whining about it, and they want to do a significant rewrite or solve it with microservices altogether.<p>And you know this rewrite, like others in the past, will be a significant sink of time, and likely a catastrophe.<p>This is how I see it from my humble developer&#x2F;team lead perspective. I’m really curious to know how people in CTO roles perceive it.<p>I agree that this is a useful quality lever that can get the whole company out of a bind, or could let business leverage a market opportunity before the competitors do.<p>What I’ve found is that people in various project-manager-like roles tend to overuse this lever. I believe this lever should be used only when there is a significant gain for the business, and the debt should be paid shortly after that.<p>What I’ve personally seen, and what I’ve been told by my fellow developers, is that it is common to use the technical debt lever just to:<p>- reach the “sprint commitment,”<p>- meet the artificial deadline,<p>- increase “developer’s productivity,”<p>- show manager’s power.<p>These don’t sound like critical high-value goals to reach, given the price of the Technical Debt.<p>That is my perspective. Now, what do you have to say?<p>As a CTO (or in a CTO-like role), what was your most consistent pain, frustration or problem with Technical Debt in your company in the last 2 years?<p>Have you ever had any?<p>Thank you for your time reading this and giving a thoughtful response. :)
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