Why Your Manager LOVES Technical Debt and What to Do About It

We have all used "Technical Debt" to describe the horrors under the covers. Why doesn't management get the same sense of impending doom that we do? Because management thinks debt is good! Debt is an essential part of business and part of managing risk in business operations.

TD is not a controlled thing with specific, manageable risks and rewards, it's a lurking monster waiting to bite us at the least opportune moment. In business-speak, what we actually have are "naked call options." Future obligations that could arise at any time, without advance notice, and having unlimited downside. All leading to downtime, outages, and loss of business. I'll be describing what this financial instrument is and how to describe your backlog of essential but non-urgent work in a way that executives and management can understand.

Help your manager lose as much sleep over this as you do; and maybe get some room in your schedule to start addressing these issues--or at least stop making new ones. Oh, and free ponies for every attendee.

Caskey Dickson is an engineer with an MBA. Currently, he is a Site Reliability Engineer/Software Engineer at Google, where he works writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale" as well as business intelligence pipelines.

Caskey has worked in online service development since 1995. Before working at Google, he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various Internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and even taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at Loyola Marymount University. He has a B.S. in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an M.B.A from Loyola Marymount.