October 21, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Tech Debt Perils
October 21, 2024 at 2:14 pm
Sorry Steve, I don't have a recommendation for a sound bar, as we are still using our 30 year old Sony sound system, that just works. No software to update, or Bluetooth or Wifi to lose connection to, just cabling. But since you brought up sound systems and software, I have a Sony Walkman from the 80's, with the AM/FM Cassette Tape, and it just works. Put a tape in, and hit play. Viola, music.
I also have a new Sony Walkman digital player, that runs on an Android backend. It can use a 1TB microSD card, so loads and loads of music. But you don't just hit play and it plays music. It has software. You have to wait for the Android system to start up. Then when you start the Walkman music app, you have to wait for that to load. If you are lucky, it will remember where you left off in your playlist, and not start over. The problem with this format, is that there are software programmers that don't understand how regular people use these things. We create playlists, generally want to just shuffle through one, or several, when we are listening to it, and we don't want to hear the player repeating songs. What you get is a player that will shuffle through your playlist, but doesn't remember songs it has already played from the playlist, so there are repeats. And it may decide to pick up tracks from playlists that you did not add to the play queue, for some reason or another. There are several other quirks that you get with a system like this, but the point is, that the developers/programmers don't seem to understand how people want products to function. The consumer has to just deal with the programming that they get, and remember to run the updates to hopefully get what they want in the software someday. I think companies could learn a lot if they would stop trying to rush products to market, and have more consumer input into their development before releasing products to the public.
October 21, 2024 at 2:25 pm
Steve, if it were possible I'd give your editorial one billion likes! I work in state government. I've been a software engineer for a couple decades. I've never seen a place so totally against reducing technical debt, as here. I think part of the problem is we don't have any competition, so there's no one trying to take our lunch from us. I also don't think I know all the reasons why we allow technical debt to grow unabated, why it is so tolerated by both management and coworkers. I think there may be some, small movement to remove some technical debt. I'm working on rewriting an old app which is so old that the technology it is built on is no longer supported by the vendor. And the vendor refuses to do anything about it. It is a case of either we upgrade or no long use this software app written here 15+ years ago, and that's not an option.
But at this point in time, this is an isolated case. Other ancient apps continue to run, until they reach their point of no longer being supported and will no longer run.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
October 21, 2024 at 5:38 pm
Hi Steve,
I completely agree on how companies ignore technical debt. Developers raise the issue and management ignores it because another checkbox on the sales flier is what marketing is clamoring for.
I have no words of wisdom to fix that but I can point in you a direction for looking for a soundbar. Cheap Audio Man has lots of good reviews of speaker, amps etc. and I watch his YouTube site fairly regularly. Here's a soundbar search on this site.
https://www.youtube.com/@cheapaudioman/search?query=soundbar
Maybe something there will fit what you're looking for.
October 21, 2024 at 6:06 pm
For home sound system receivers I typically go with Yamaha. Excellent sound, but their interfaces are probably the most nonintuitive and cryptic you will ever find where the directions are not written in Chinese.
Technical debt for an old school manufacturing company can reach levels that have to be seen to be understood. At one point when XP had just gone out of support we had a new IT director visit one of our bigger production facilities to try and understand why it was still being used on the process side of the firewalls. It was an eye opener to him when he was shown some of the production process relied on some electronic controls equipment that hadn't been made since the 1970s. There was a supply of replacements sourced from eBay in a closet. Slightly out of support XP was the least of the issues at that site. Good news was that visit brought enough visibility to the issue with upper management that reducing the tech debt on the production control network has gotten significant budgets and work the last few years. The scale of the problem is still immense, but it is now shrinking.
October 22, 2024 at 6:20 am
In the position I am in now, within reason, I can pay down tech debt. One of the 1st tasks I was given when I joined my current company was to standardise and upgrade a whole load of apps, their build process and CICD pipelines. In some cases those apps were well covered by tests, in others nothing so I took meaningful test coverage to be the standard to aim for.
At the time I wasn't able to do much for the tech debt but getting standardised CICD pipelines, build process and automated tests in place laid the foundations for future tech debt payments. With what we have now we can tell in an instant if a change will break something because the tests pick it up and mostly on the developer's laptop, not when it hits a shared resource. This means that if there are any quiet periods at work, developers are free to make changes that address tech debt issues as long as any additions are covered by meaningful tests and any breakages are fixed. As long as all tests pass and the pull request is approved the work is merged into the main git branch and will go into the next release. Next release being any time from the same hour to the same fortnight.
In some cases the tech debt manifests itself in a lack of documentation. As everyone has to provide support and no-one enjoys having to support a poorly documented system there is a vested interest in making sure useful documentation is available. I don't think we will ever be perfect but at least we are travelling in the right direction.
In past positions the problem has been that there has been a separation between "The Business" and "Tech" with Tech being the lowest of the low, tugging their forelock and begging Lord Business for an indulgence. No-one benefits from polarisation of power and these days if "Tech" is not regarded as part of "The business" then that is a sign that all is not well. I think of it like servicing my car. I don't tell the mechanic how to do their job. If they tell me the brake pads need changing I don't prioritise alloy wheels and air fresheners.
October 22, 2024 at 10:52 pm
Sorry Steve, I don't have a recommendation for a sound bar, as we are still using our 30 year old Sony sound system, that just works. No software to update, or Bluetooth or Wifi to lose connection to, just cabling. But since you brought up sound systems and software, I have a Sony Walkman from the 80's, with the AM/FM Cassette Tape, and it just works. Put a tape in, and hit play. Viola, music.
I also have a new Sony Walkman digital player, that runs on an Android backend. ...
I feel that way about the music system in my 2012 BMW. It has an internal HDD as well as CD player (or USB). It even has an iPhone 4 cradle to link up with music. Every time I use the music features I think the BMW programmers never used the system or were mentally challenged. There had already been a nearly a decade of iPods out there to learn from, but they decided on a bunch of incredibly poor UX anyway.
October 22, 2024 at 10:52 pm
Sorry Steve, I don't have a recommendation for a sound bar, as we are still using our 30 year old Sony sound system, that just works. No software to update, or Bluetooth or Wifi to lose connection to, just cabling. But since you brought up sound systems and software, I have a Sony Walkman from the 80's, with the AM/FM Cassette Tape, and it just works. Put a tape in, and hit play. Viola, music.
I also have a new Sony Walkman digital player, that runs on an Android backend. ...
I feel that way about the music system in my 2012 BMW. It has an internal HDD as well as CD player (or USB). It even has an iPhone 4 cradle to link up with music. Every time I use the music features I think the BMW programmers never used the system or were mentally challenged. There had already been a nearly a decade of iPods out there to learn from, but they decided on a bunch of incredibly poor UX anyway.
October 22, 2024 at 10:53 pm
Steve, if it were possible I'd give your editorial one billion likes! I work in state government. I've been a software engineer for a couple decades. I've never seen a place so totally against reducing technical debt, as here. I think part of the problem is we don't have any competition, so there's no one trying to take our lunch from us. I also don't think I know all the reasons why we allow technical debt to grow unabated, why it is so tolerated by both management and coworkers. I think there may be some, small movement to remove some technical debt. I'm working on rewriting an old app which is so old that the technology it is built on is no longer supported by the vendor. And the vendor refuses to do anything about it. It is a case of either we upgrade or no long use this software app written here 15+ years ago, and that's not an option.
But at this point in time, this is an isolated case. Other ancient apps continue to run, until they reach their point of no longer being supported and will no longer run.
Crazy, right? I don't understand sometimes either why people just don't want to do better somewhere. Not everywhere, or everything, but just somewhere.
October 22, 2024 at 10:57 pm
Hi Steve,
I completely agree on how companies ignore technical debt. Developers raise the issue and management ignores it because another checkbox on the sales flier is what marketing is clamoring for.
I have no words of wisdom to fix that but I can point in you a direction for looking for a soundbar. Cheap Audio Man has lots of good reviews of speaker, amps etc. and I watch his YouTube site fairly regularly. Here's a soundbar search on this site.
https://www.youtube.com/@cheapaudioman/search?query=soundbar
Maybe something there will fit what you're looking for.
Thanks, Cheap Audio Man sounds like what I need. Just want something to watch some streaming at night that's better than the TV.
October 23, 2024 at 3:09 pm
A thought occurred to me about this topic. We've got developers (I'm one), operations, system administrators, DBAs, project managers, business analysts, DevOps personnel (again, I'm one), etc. But one role I've never heard of is something like Technical Debt Manager, or something similar. I wonder why there's no such title?
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
October 26, 2024 at 9:02 am
I love how professional the responses have been on this thread, offering suggestions how technical debt can be better managed and not pointing the finger directly at some vendors knowing full well we could post a whole host of issues with certain vendors (I know I could rant about a certain vendor selling us a product that will solve all our problems only to find they have missed one the main points of the products use, it is still missing this key feature even after 3 years of subsequent updates).
Like many here from an earlier generation - before tech was here to solve 'every problem we have', I loved the simplicty of a product was designed to do just what it aims to do without and overly complex OS or software (Sony Walkman cassette player vs Sony Walkman digital player is a great example), or Mobile phones that had just 2 (or 3) 'simple' tasks 1) make phone calls, 2) send SMS messages (3) play snake ;-)) rather than the 'Phones' we have today that do pretty much everything (except make a coffee)
Some of this is sadly the marketers decisions to get more and more (IMHO 'unnecessary') features added to their products without actually checking whether it is required or 'helps' their customers.
All this does is push us into having to buy the latest tech to increase their profit. I could post many links explaining why this is (from an environmental persective) a living nightmare. Consumers need to demand product vendors, give us reliable, long life products that are not wasting earths limited resources i.e. this is our only home.
I saw this BBC news article yesterday: "The green software that could make big carbon savings - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j7md2kj8vo" (I am based in the UK) and am glad there are some organisations trying to do better things for our planet, having read the article and investigated /e/OS a bit I'm even considering it as a possible option to extend the life of our corporate Android phones. A good example of someone that has found a problem and trying to solve it for the better of all.
October 29, 2024 at 4:02 pm
I love how professional the responses have been on this thread, offering suggestions how technical debt can be better managed and
...
Some of this is sadly the marketers decisions to get more and more (IMHO 'unnecessary') features added to their products without actually checking whether it is required or 'helps' their customers. All this does is push us into having to buy the latest tech to increase their profit. ...
I saw this BBC news article yesterday: "The green software that could make big carbon savings - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j7md2kj8vo" (I am based in the UK) and am glad there are some organisations trying to do better things for our planet, having read the article and investigated /e/OS a bit I'm even considering it as a possible option to extend the life of our corporate Android phones. A good example of someone that has found a problem and trying to solve it for the better of all.
I think the reality of many modern businesses is driving an upgrade cycle. That being said, lots of the previous generations built things that were of limited quality and would need to be replaced every xx years. Just our xx is lower than their xx.
That being said, features are sometimes unnecessary, but everyone is in competition. I find lots of software people looking to solve a problem for a few people, and hoping it will be one many more people have. This seems (to me) to often get us features a few people really want, but many might not want, or make things worse. It's a weird balance.
Thanks for the article. Glad to see people making the world better.
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