"housekeeping" refers to cleaning up (e.g. deleting temp file cruft) as well as improving and redesigning (e.g. updating the code as systems upgrade and evolve).
"tech debt" refers to temporary or poor quality work that needs to be fixed in the future. It's akin to replacing a cracked panel held together with duct tape.
But confused business logic grows organically, and feels like tech debt instead of housekeeping.
Specially when "tech debt" is associated to a evolution of things which grinds down the ability to do any work or even have something working, than debt as in "operating at loss" (debt being something fine given enough revenue or capital for it, or even cheat out via bigger picture investments, see things like Über).
@diana@yvonnezlam the thing that never made sense to me about "tech debt" is that "debt" implies you can have the opposite, a surplus. Where's the jar of tech saved for a rainy day that we can use to pay off a friend's tech debt immediately?
It's a C-suite level view of the problem, where inconvenient details are abstracted into fungible units that can be solved with fungible headcount
@diana@yvonnezlam very keen observation. Never seen that spelled out so fitting.
In the past techies called that housekeeping, but that did not find its way to leading roles. You couldn't sell housekeeping. However, the technical debt was way better understood by business leaders, as debt is something they understand.
So I will mark that screenshot and may cite it, when it is convenient. 😁
@diana The dishwasher and washing machine would be CI/CD or some kind of automation I suppose in this metaphor. And we know how much we let dishes and laundry pile up. Show me your kitchen sink! 😅 #TechDebt
@yvonnezlam@diana omg I feel this so hard. at home ironically my partner does the majority of housework but on my dev teams I’m often the one pushing for “housework” to get done before it piles up into scary messes.
@r343l@diana It is such a struggle. The tech work ethos of "everything must be a project" makes it even harder to deal with the equivalent of "people are not putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher" until it's become "we've run out of dishes AND the counters are piled high AND by the way, people are not putting their dirty dishes in the dishwasher."
@yvonnezlam@diana I am the annoying team member that files issues for the “chores” so as to normalize them as actual work that needs to be done just like new features or whatever. Obviously doesn’t always work but makes me feel better. 😂
@r343l@yvonnezlam@diana I've been person on many of the teams I've worked on. Especially when I see TODO comments in PRs that's an immediate "request changes": "This TODO should ideally be solved with this PR. If there are good reasons not to do that, the TODO comment is missing the number of the ticket you created to solve it later"
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