> They’re saying that in their experience this isn’t nearly as common as it is typically portrayed.
How would you know if the poor commercial performance was due to tech debt or not though? It's the intangibility of tech debt that makes it so insidious.
Can't speak for the person I was citing. But I think I get what they're saying.
My personal experience has been that tech debt is more often caused by business level decisions and not engineering decisions. Deadline on this contract is next week so let's ship what we got and worry about it later. Hey, good news everyone we just pivoted 180 degrees so let's try to salvage what we've got.
So yes it very well might be that a mountain of tech debt was the final nail in the coffin. But why was that tech debt there in the first place? I was understanding the GP as saying they saw business decisions leading to poor engineering instead of engineering just doing dumb things on their own. I've seen plenty of examples of the latter but a lot more of the former in my travels.
How would you know if the poor commercial performance was due to tech debt or not though? It's the intangibility of tech debt that makes it so insidious.