Ask HN (about): Technical debt within a constantly changing business model | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN (about): Technical debt within a constantly changing business model

The founder of the company I work for explained to me today that I should not worry about technical debt until we have a business model that floats. Basically every project we do is throwaway until we find a path to the big money. My issue is that these projects aren't prototypes. They are iOS apps that are in the appstore and are built for clients. What do you guys think? Is everything a hack job until a business idea sticks? So far, I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea.

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It sounds like you are developing, the founder is managing, and the founder made a judgment call based on his knowledge of the market versus technical debt. He is choosing to make the trade-off.

As developers, our responsibility is to ensure our leads are aware enough of the cost to make good calls, and their responsibility is to make those good calls based on their perspectives, perspectives that include more factors than just our future development time.

Maybe the judgment call is to reduce features and focus on quality of features that were implemented on this iteration. Maybe the judgment call is to release a feature because the market demand is just right and the feature is "good enough".

This is a typical balance in our industry.

This comment makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for sharing.

Well, it's a chicken and egg situation.

You need time and money to minimize technical debt. In a startup, both of those are in short supply.

Unless your company is well funded or has other sources of revenue, prepare to be uncomfortable for some time.

I think I agree with you, there are huge open source projects that may not have had a business model to start with, but companies paid $bns to own them (think databases).

Yeah, it seems to me that taking the time to build something with polish __is__ what gives the company value.

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