Federal Budget! 358 references to 'gender,' 456 to 'investing' money | Page 2 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Federal Budget! 358 references to 'gender,' 456 to 'investing' money

So when the developers cant make it work, need more money to sort it out, for whatever reason, its tech debt.

if it was underestimated in the first place, poorly designed, poorly implimented, impossible to reset, rediculously complicated to program, we'd just call it mismanagement in my office out loud ( a cluster f quietly) but i get it now, its tech debt

At its core it is mismanagement, but tech debt is a very common "thing" that occurs when management is not tech savvy, and this is almost always the reason why tech debt happens.

I'll give a very concrete example:

My workplace refuses to pay for SQL Server 2017 which has some built in history functions to store every change done in the database if enabled. This functionality was still required but they did not want to pay so I created a workaround to get to work with our current SQL 2015, which actually already cost them more due to the time it took me to implement, and test said functionality. They have also said they will purchase SQL Server 2017 eventually; when they do this, I need to undo my changes and test. So their decision has tripled my workload, which is fine...but they're losing money because they know I do not work more than 40 hours a week.

Another example: Bell, Rogers, and our government uses some extremely old legacy systems. In order to get these legacy systems to work, they are either running in limping mainframes or in virtual machines. These systems are generally slow and extremely difficult to maintain due to out-of-trend technology. The problem is that most of these systems are core components so every other component has to be built on top of it. This produces a bottleneck.

Bottlenecks will:

- Cost money because efficiency will be capped
- Cause workers to become frustrated (I've spoken to a few government workers about this)
- Frustrated workers make mistakes, frustrated workers will also alt tab and start "multi tasking" (aka slacking off) because every time they hit a button it takes 10 seconds for **** to happen

In addition, just like the scenario I'm experiencing, this leads to **** costing more in the long run. The amount of data that gets shoved into a system usually grows exponentially; data is money. The more components and data is stacked on a legacy system, the more costly the inevitable rewrite of the legacy system will be.

So sure, it's mismanagement but mismanagement is a symptom of the cause which is ignorance.
 
At my company, "Tech Debt" usually refers to old equipment/software that needs to be dumped/upgraded. This isn't necessarily mismanaged/poorly planned stuff from earlier, it's just older stuff that needs to be upgraded.

A bunch of old RHEL5 machines would be an example of Tech Debt; they were functional and served their purpose, but now need to be upgraded to stay current (for security/performance/capability reasons). This takes time and effort, but is necessary.
 

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