Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it.
Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity.
Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review.
Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents.
Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy!
Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them.
Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs.
And then…
Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies.
So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?
Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity.
Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review.
Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents.
Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy!
Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them.
Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs.
And then…
Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies.
So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?