Ask HN: Have you ever worked on a product that was killed by technical debt?
Yes and no.<p>The project wasn&#x27;t killed specifically because &quot;you have technical debt&quot;.  It was killed because there was no way for anyone to be effective with the combination of poor undocumented code.<p>&quot;We need to change the email message that goes out when someone registers&quot;.  This took a team of (4?) people 5 calendar days to change.  As a contractor, I had to vpn in to one system, then remote desktop over another vpn to another system.  Building web apps, these dev systems were not allowed to talk to the internet at all, so things like pulling external dependencies (security libraries, templating libraries, etc) was impossible - pretty much everything was handrolled, largely due to this restriction.<p>The last big killer was that the system was not passing accessibility audits.  Trying to determine where to make a change to any single element would take minutes to hours, vs seconds to minutes you&#x27;d normally expect.  Much of the &#x27;templates&#x27; used were the result of a SQL statement joining 12 tables (html_meta, html_form, html_link, html_grid, etc) and complex concat()s, so adding a page or making a change might take an hour to track down the appropriate collection of tables, then figure out a SQL script to run, then send it to the person who had permissions to make updates to the SQL, then wait and see.<p>Did the technical debt itself kill the project?  Technically no, but the inability to do anything productive in a reasonable amount of time forced the project to shut down.