Everybody lives and dies by the numbers, long term consequences be damned.<p>Even developers do this, although most of us resent having to do it.  You manage risk and tech debt by splitting high risk projects into many small pieces, and amortizing improvements across low-complexity features.  The long and short lines are never more than an order of magnitude or so apart, even though it might take ten &#x27;tasks&#x27; to equal one change that the customer will actually notice.