Again in many instances it’s more the tunnel vision on the end of tech people who tend to be idealistic. The incentives or goals for the person who has to make the decisions can have nothing to do with long term health of the codebase or a product. They might be preparing a company and/or division for sale and need to hit certain numbers or their bonus structure is tied to some metric that has 0 correlation with long term tech.health. They might be gunning for a promotion and might not care at all what happens once they leave. So while it might seem to us like they are acting irrationally in reality they might be actually behaving in a very calculated and rational manner (obviously they will never reveal their true reasons for not giving a F#$%).
@andre1sk I don’t disagree at all, I am completely with you. And yes, us the techies are somewhat idealistic about the things outside our bubble – but that’s not a bad thing. It’s a valuable point of view that many can draw lessons from. But I’ll not go off-topic.
All I am saying is that it takes a mixed set of skills from a business person to recognize the proper time to act on technical debt before it becomes too expensive for the company. I don’t, and I won’t ever, ask for the business people to only prioritize technology.
My two cents:
I’m a business owner myself, and I can’t imagine turning someone away because they’re passionate about learning new things. To me, that is a key characteristic of a good developer. That being said, I’m also a developer myself, so I tend to have a more difficult time thinking in terms of business than I do in terms of development passion.
