He Was Just a Kid - A Story About Technical Debt

There is a thing in every engineering team that nobody talks about.

Not because it’s a secret - everyone knows. They just hope that if they ignore it long enough, it will go away.

It won’t.

Let me tell you a story about how it got there.

Chapter One: How He Was Born

Your competitor just shipped an amazing new feature. The obvious move: you need it too, or you fall behind.

It took them six months. You need to do it in three.

Or - you know what? Two.

You push. And you might even pull it off. At least it looks that way.

Then they ship the next feature - the one they finished while you were busy catching up. So now you’re chasing again.

By rights, this should be the easy one. You’ve done this before, faster than they did. If you can fold six months of work into two, the next round should take weeks. The one after that, an afternoon.

It took two months.

You walk across the engineering floor. A bunch of tired people, moving slowly.

Oh. And there’s a kid, quietly asleep, out of everyone’s sight.

Yep. That’s your technical debt - just born.

Chapter Two: How He Learned to Feed Himself

Children grow fast. I mean incredibly fast.

Technical debt does that too.

Engineers look after it, hoping it’ll stay little - but kids grow whether you want them to or not. Every new requirement feeds it. And a lot of what it eats is junk - biscuits, pizza, soda. It grows stronger and bigger every time a feature is added.

It gets into its teenage years and becomes unbearable. You want to kick it out, but you realize that’s how teenagers sometimes are. So you wait. It will get better once it’s an adult.

You discuss this problem with the team and other managers, but it looks like everyone is too busy to do anything about it.

There are other priorities.

It makes your life harder and harder in the meantime. You have to invest more resources to get the same outcome.
Engineers are complaining about the workarounds they have to implement.

Every workaround seems to create two more.

But the time has come…

You’ve had enough. Time to get rid of it - it’s an adult, it needs to take care of itself now.

Wait - problems don’t get fixed by themselves.

So you call a meeting to figure it out.

Chapter Three: Five Hours, One Task

There is this weird enthusiasm. Why is everyone happy?

Engineers have seen a lot of problems that needed to be fixed.

Finally, something is being done about them.

“How bad is it?”

Nothing.

“Look, guys, we really need to get rid of all that technical debt. I need cooperation.”

After five long hours, there are some ideas.

At the next sprint planning, you manage to squeeze in one of those tasks - out of fifty…

Before leaving the room, you scan it one more time. You suddenly remember that there was a small kid sleeping in the corner some time ago.

You look at that spot.

The kid is gone.

An adult guy is sitting there now, feet up on the desk, laughing at you.

Those meetings repeat.

That guy keeps getting bigger, uglier, and more comfortable.

Chapter Four: Someone Poked Him

Whenever you come into the room, it feels heavier. That guy fills the whole room now.

You have tried all sorts of things. Every action your team took felt like just another slice of pizza for him.
He was happily eating it - growing bigger and hungrier.

You watch your team struggle to move around him.

One day, you come in for a regular meeting.

Something is weird.

You check the Technical Debt guy - he is still as big as ever. You look at the people - and they seem brighter for whatever reason.

Even the room feels less heavy.

You start asking what is going on.

“You know that database migration issue that blocked us? Mark solved it.”

Mark is a new guy, still getting familiar with the system. You hired him because technical debt was slowing everything down, so you needed more hands.

“How?”

“Oh. He didn’t know it was unfixable. So he fixed it while doing some other task because it blocked him.”

How does that make any sense?

The room is buzzing. You look around at your team, and they are in heated discussion.
There is fire in their eyes as they talk about other “impossible” problems.

Then you look at the Technical Debt guy, and he is still as big as ever.

Is it his posture? His confidence?

Something about him also feels a little different.

Or is it just your imagination?

He definitely doesn’t look happy.

Wait…

He doesn’t have any pizza before him!

But you don’t want to give yourself false hope.

Final Chapter: He Has to Leave Soon

The next time you come, it isn’t much different. There is still no pizza. Looks like he found some veggies, though. But he didn’t really grow from eating them.

One month later, the engineers build a schedule. Small weekly stuff - a few push-ups, a few walks.

He doesn’t like it.

He drags his feet, sneaks a biscuit when no one is looking. But the routine isn’t his to cancel. It belongs to the team, and the team holds the line.

Three months later, the slips are rarer.

He’s not doing it for you - he’s doing it because the discipline around him never lets up. You catch the biscuit days early, so even when he drifts, he doesn’t drift far.

Then one morning, someone notices he’s lighter.

The old weight he’d been hauling for years - the dependencies nobody dared touch, the system everyone called unfixable - is just gone.

Not in one heroic sprint.

Piece by piece, the way Mark fixed his blocker: someone stopped believing it couldn’t be done, and then it was only work. Four years of “we can’t” turned out to be work that could simply get done.

He moves through the room now without everyone having to step around him.

Even other departments start joining - going for a light jog. They sometimes offer him some cake, but he can handle it without gaining weight.

One day you walk into the room and instinctively glance toward the corner.

Nobody is there.

For a second it feels strange.

You smile.

He was born here for a reason.

You needed to move fast, and he was the cost of that speed.

You helped create him.

One day another kid will show up in that corner.

But this time, everyone will know he isn’t supposed to stay.

Technical debt isn’t something you avoid forever. It’s something you borrow carefully, knowing you’ll eventually have to repay it.