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Most Technical Problems Are Really People Problems

blog.joeschrag.com · 896 words · saved by 1 readers

I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, based on frameworks that were well over a decade out of date.  On one specific project, we had a market need to get some Windows-only modules running on Linux, and rather than cross-compiling, another team had simply copied & pasted a few hundred thousand lines of code, swapping Windows-specific components for Linux-specific. For the non-technical reader, this is an enormous problem because now two versions of the code exist.  So, all features & bug fixes must be solved in two separate codebases that will grow apart over time.  When I heard about this, a young & naive version of me set out to fix the situation.... Tech debt projects are always a hard sell to management, because even if everything goes flawlessly, the code just does roughly what it did before.  This project was no exception, and the optics weren't great.  I did as many engineers do and "ignored the polit

Most Technical Problems Are Really People Problems on October 24, 2025 Get link Facebook X Pinterest Email Other Apps I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using libraries with known vulnerabilities, so far out of date that upgrading them was deemed too difficult. On one specific project, we had a market need to get some Windows-only modules running on Linux, and rather than cross-compiling, another team had simply copied & pasted a few hundred thousand lines of code, swapping Windows-specific componen

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