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There are many paths to the center in both life and software engineering:

Systems Out of Balance: If you’re clever you probably spotted it on your own: in each example the tech debt produced pulls the organization further away from what it’s trying to accomplish by taking on that debt:

As the saying goes "all things in moderation." The best organizations at managing technical debt tend to be the ones that have a thoughtful process in place to adjudicate competing incentives. Everyone has to have a pathway to win. Engineering needs Product to be successful in order to safely grow their beautiful systems. Product needs Engineering to win in order to maintain agility in the market. Security needs people to listen to them, but also needs mere mortals to reign in their paranoia.

Although we’re more accustomed to legacy projects coming from large organizations, all large organizations start off as small organizations first. If the organization is too small for a structure (or even worse has given in to the delusions around “flat” organizations) you can still predict the set of problems by looking at who’s on top. What is the background of the CEO? If they have a free hour… are they pushing code or making sales calls?


Tags: reading   management  

Last modified 07 October 2024