Given the debt crises in Italy, Greece, and the US, just to name a few, the idea of debt is often parts of our conversations. As little as five years ago who would have believed that the US could double it’s debt that took 200 years to accumulate. While we all probably think this is outrageous let’s consider the debt that we accumulate within our systems. We’ve all heard and probably used the term technical debt but do we really understand how bad it can affect us and how quickly?

We often tell clients that they need to spend 12 – 25% of their engineering time on maintenance issues to pay down this debt. Failing to do so can result in some horrendous work stoppages. As an example, we had a client that has been around for a little more than a decade and had a great little profitable business. They were bringing in finance to grow their operations outside of the NY-metro area and needed help scaling. Unfortunately they had ignored refactoring, scaling, and maintenance in general for most of the time they’ve been in business. The result was that when a potential client asked to add a second email address on accounts the estimate came back at 1,500 hours…yes, that’s right 190 days or about 3/4 of a year of a developer to simply add an email field. Given that engineers typically are optimistic about how long it will take to accomplish something, imagine how long this really took.

The take away here for both our countries and our organizations is to not let debt pile up. Face the pain and balance the budget because if you don’t it only gets worse.