Comment Re:This should not be on the front page (Score 2) 247
Tech debt is like credit card debt: the interest is a bitch. I worded for a while at one company that nearly folded because the time required for emergency bug fixes grew to, then past 100% of development time for the team. Horrible code doesn't just require more bug fixes in the first place, each change grows progressively more expensive and unsafe.
10k lines of shipped, production code is only of value if it's working bug free and without complaint. 10k lines of buggy code, that you have to add a week to any project that modifies in any way, that has negative value.
That being said, if the code is "cleaned up" by the same team that wrote it in the first place, you likely don't come out ahead. The only reason that company "nearly" folded was monuments willingness to hire about 10 senior guys like me to rescue what we could - 6 of them quite within a few weeks, but the 4 of us who stayed managed a few core fixes that kept it limping along for enough time to find a buyer for the company before it went under.