After thought:

Tech Debt is NOT a badge of honour, it's the opposite, it says "we made an engineering decision so bad that we now have to spend time and effort fixing/changing things which adds ZERO business value".

This definitions belongs in dictionary!

Fixing tech debt is generally zero business value activity but it often exists because of other business constrains such as delivery time or budget.

So as much as annoying it is, it's inevitable that some tech debt exists in most of the situations.

100% agree.

JUST_DO_IT (add value, fast) <-----------------------------------> WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS (enterprise arch etc etc)

The BIG problem is the total misconception that:

> JUST_DO_IT = bad engineering

> WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS = good engineering

In reality, the quality of execution is independent of the development approach - you can make a complete mess of either approach, however, the WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS approach WILL cost you a LOT more time and money to discover your team has messed up it and WILL cost a lot more time and money to fix.

My experience is that, just as your product evolves & grows, your engineering strategy should evolve and grow. There's a good reason why fortune 500 companies will have enormous IT teams, using enterprise cloud technology... and there's a good reason why successful tech start-ups do the exact opposite.... but hopefully, the startup will become a fortune 500 company.

ah, sorry! I've not been here for years actually, I always remember people posting tech/startup positions, but fair enough - I wont do it again.

so Dont try to fix the problem, just limit the consequences.

this type of action is likely to have the exactly opposite effect.

oh, free burgers every Friday :-)

Just another one of my little web apps, some might find it useful or inspiring...

tom (APIHouse.com)

Why is 'email' not an option? Which is by FAR the most commonly used internal communication system - although I do NOT recommend it!

http://teamstinct.com/but-whats-wrong-with-email

Teamtinct.com - It is still in its early days, but works great.

Another subjective list and a another misunderstanding of the word 'innovation'.

Where are Philips who are pioneering high efficiency LED lighting, or TomTom that gave us the first decent GPS for cars? or Ubuntu that gave the world its first decent free operating system? or eBay, still the leader in global re-cycling... and I'm sure there are loads of companies that make amazing scientific and medical innovations that I am unaware of.

and Sony - because they just ARE an innovative company (the walkman/discman, betamax, minidisc, S/PDIF, bluray, professional broadcast and audio products.

Philips I've already mentioned, but companies like Toshiba give us lots of innovation with things like disc drives (I cant remember Starbucks ever developing a new type of fast, energy efficient storage media, although that did give us the 'mocha-choca-frappa-latte')

(although I am glad NOT to see Dyson on the list for producing excessively expensive vacuum cleaners with little or no perceivable benefit

or Intel (whose modern power saving CPU's are probably inside almost everyone laptops?

or Toyota for making practical hybrid cars

PS: Although I enjoy Google products, they haven't 'invented' a single one. Search engines? Email? not exactly a Google innovation.

or ARM for making the best processors to go into mobile devices with low energy consumption?

Or NASA for, well, especially 'Curiosity'

or Microsoft for the XBox 'Kinetic' system.

>Ubuntu that gave the world its first decent free operating system

lol what

Although just realised quite irritatingly that the local Web Storage is not shared across browsers - thus, you can not write data from Chrome then read it from Firefox - W3C, where are you when we need you!!!