The Human Cost of Tech Debt
I recently became CTO of a company with two moderately successful SaaS products. The second one is a fork of the first, but has been maintained by more competent people than the original product. Both are still monuments to technical debt.<p>About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.<p>I&#x27;m bringing competent and well paid people in through my network and try my very best to give them as much freedom as possible, I allow and encourage greenfield modules&#x2F;services that run on separate and new infrastructure for anything that is possible to be rewritten in the timeframes, but the larger part of the job is still mind numbing to my team and that makes me question my wisdom.<p>If anyone has tips on how to steer such a ship in a direction where the work is less frustrating for my devs I&#x27;m very open for advice.