Technical Debt, Illustrated

Applicable to series B or C startups, I guess

Many people, especially of management persuasion, have inadequate understanding of what technical debt really is.

Gemini (Nano Banana Pro) generated — and it shows; sorry about that (it’s 0:30 AM now and work tomorrow)

They tend to think that technical debt is something that just hasn’t been done earlier — in order to achieve business advantage sooner (and cheaper); so, let’s just do it now and that’ll get us out of our technical debt, right?

This is not exactly how technical debt works.

Let’s illustrate it with a simple home example: getting a brand new A̶I̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶-i̶s̶h̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ ̶ TV for your new-ish house!

So, you want to get a new TV, but, after building your house, you’re still in debt :(

If it’s a financial debt, you go to your bank, and, if they give you more credit, you get the TV, if not, well, you’ll have to work some more first; simple, yeah?

But if it’s a technical debt… The story is a bit longer.

Sure, you go to the store and you buy the TV, and you bring it home with your big truck, and here, you have the precious cardboard box in your living room.

Hmm… You’d like to put it on a TV stand, in front of your sofa, but your old TV stand is too small.

Okay, you go to another store and buy a nice matching TV stand, then, you bring it home with your big truck, you have two precious cardboard boxes in your living room.

You take the old TV and its stand out… and discover the flooring needs to be reinforced in order to put the new TV and its stand on it.

You — yourself — try to remove a bit of the old flooring where the new TV stand needs to be, but then, you see you can’t separate it from the entire room’s flooring…

…So, you call your flooring guys, okay, they remove the old flooring, but then, the floor base needs repairs as it’s too fragile. So, your flooring guys dig through the crumbling flooring, until… they hit a water pipe, just a little, and since it happens in the evening, and no one notices, you have your basement flooded in the morning…

[Few weeks later] Yes, you’ve done all the repairs, at several dozen times the cost of the TV, and the latter stands proudly on the new TV stand atop the new flooring and above the dry basement. Now, as you’re plugging in the TV, you see the plug looks funny, and no, it’s not the matter of a socket adapter, it’s a three-phase AC in your walls (you vaguely remember buying an unusual old TV from a long-gone-now vendor earlier)… So, you must break the walls and install the regular AC converter outside and replace the compliant cabling in the walls — just as you finished the grand cleanup after the flooring repairs.

Undeterred, you call your electricity guys up… And also, your construction guys too…

[Few months later] Yes! All done, the TV is installed, powered up and it’s time to connect it to the internet… It’s a smart TV, and it uses a high-speed internet connection. And you have got the high-speed subscription, right? Right???

…Yeah, nope, your house is too far from a high-speed internet infrastructure, and so, the only option at the moment is to subscribe to high-speed satellite internet, which will cost ya, but hey, you’ve invested so much already, this is no place to stop.

Some time passes, you replace your roof to accommodate the satellite dish and your outside electrical equipment because it was interfering with the signal… You sit on your sofa, under a new roof, your TV remote in hand, you browse through the rich channel menu on your TV, upon a slick new stand, atop the new flooring, but… wait…

…Where are your favourite channels in the menu?? Yeah, they all broadcast only in the brand new format your new-ish TV doesn’t support.

Luckily, you have no technical debt now and you can just go and get a new TV… If you only weren’t in so much financial debt by now…

Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash