The Hidden Cost of Speed

Months later, marketing and management requests have continued non-stop and (of course) you’ve had no time to lace everything up. You think back to that fateful decision to implement a quick fix, not anticipating that the organization would utilize it on a daily basis, requiring constant updates for every unique sales avenue. In your haste, you built a system that is functionally not operable within the rest of the ecosystem—and you are now subject to that decision. As the requests take longer and longer to work, questions start to arise: “Is our developer losing his touch? Why is this taking so long when it used to take minutes?”

I feel this on a deep spiritual level. All too often we are asked to get features out the door as soon as possible to meet an immediate business need and are not always given the time later to clean the code up to make the system better.

Tech debt is real, and eventually comes for us all.