Hey Boss, look here!
I made a magical X-ray app that displays our code as wiring.
Here is the shiny, neat program that Bob wrote 15 years ago, right before he left us:
And here is what it is today, after Tom took it from Bob, and Jane from Tom, and Mick from Jane, and me from him, porting it to roughly four new platforms, and adding about 240 features from customer requests (150 of which were urgent):
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Problem is that now your boss is just going to say Claude can trace those wires for you.
Claude will remove everything for you. Can’t have technical debt if there’s no code.
New Clod same as the old Clod.
But this one is Clauder
Claude - I can’t deal with this let me cleanup
rm -rf /Wireless it is.
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You could probably coax Bob out of retirement for the amount of money in tokens it would take to achieve that
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Or, ya know, run open source models internally if you actually find them helpful.
Sure, just need $3000 for an extra GPU with at least 24GB ram to load any reliable models. Tested Qwen 3 with my 3060 and it hallucinated a Legoland theme park next to a village with a population of 500 in the middle of nowhere.
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boss: new feature and revenue stream unlocked, hey Marcus let’s build this!
As someone who has managed racks, that first picture isn’t usable after day 1.
There’s not place for extra cable length to go.
Zip ties?!? I’d make you cut every one of those out.
Every cable needs to be tied down.
Cable tracing requires cutting.
There’s no service loops.
That’s because this is a broadcast rack (probably for sports) sending SDI over all those cables, notice it’s all BNC not Ethernet. This is probably in a truck that needs to get packed up and shipped to the next game/race/whatever and so doing it all in Velcro with service loops is asking for shit to fall apart on the road for you to find with like a 24 hour timeline until the event
So that’s why shits locked down, it ain’t web server shit
Point still stands, OP is making a poor comparison.
Might be a poor comparison, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad way to present it to thier boss. If the analogy, however flawed, communicates the underlying idea to the listener, then it was effective.
The concept here is very related to why “ceci n’est pas un pipe” is/was compelling.
If boss understands that, then he also understands tech debt.
I’m a developer who occasionally is the ‘smart hands’ (for our networks team) for some equipment in our office.
Fortunately ours is all Velcro tied so tidily adding an extra cable was awkward but ultimately trivial.
So, please educate a novice who wants to do right: what do you mean by every cable needs to be tied down? You mean individually?
In the 1st photo adding any cable would mean zip tying it down individually.
Ah, right. Unless replacing every zip tie along the cable route.
Which would suck.
Tightly bound cables/wiring is my pet hate. Even if there’s room to add stuff it makes tracing anything a nightmare.
I would absolutely prefer to trace something in the second pic.
Yeah. It looks good for a picture, all that super tight cable management, but really your cables are plenty managed if you can just get something out of the middle of the rack without having to unplug things.
I have way too much to do to spend time on making my server rack look like supermodel for that one time one guy that is not me looks at it.
to me, it matters if its backplane or frontend patchwork. just my 2 cents
i had the explaine this to my project manager. how are you going to have all our project completed by the skin of our teeth after mandatory overtime, over and over again, and not convince the client to pay for a refactor, AND not calculate a stacking buffer for project complete times? the tech debt will be paid, he has to choose the terms before it’s chosen for him
If “mandatory overtime” is needed outside the realm of multiple catastrophic surprise events on a company-ending scale, your “project manager” is absolute shit.
Overpromise, underdeliver. Looks good from my house!
Cable porn vs cable gore
Time to get out the old tone generator.
“Technical debt” is a phrase that was invented to explain the phenomenon in a way that bean-counting business bosses could understand: we can do it this way in a way that costs us less today but will incur a debt that will slow us down in the future. It was always an attempt to quantify the concept in a way that we have to think about tradeoffs between our current resources and our future resources.
The only problem is that technical debt in software is not visible.
I’m likely spoilt for this but I will take as much time as I need to do things properly, even the “Urgent” ones.
What’s this, a Toy Story rack?
