I do a lot of technical due diligence for companies in a bunch of different contexts (private equity pre-acquisition, post acquisition, management change over, etc). I have found that tech debt is highly correlated to the business goals and tech organization structure, and has to be evaluated in those contexts.
Startups you want to see with fairly high tech debt. Tech debt there is a very often a sign of shipped code that is meeting some customer need. You do need to watch out for insane tech debt that may be hard to undo later on (running everything in an ancient proprietary language for example).
Startups with low tech debt often are devs navel gazing without a lot of revenue coming in. This is surprisingly true almost all the time.
Very large companies will tend to have a mashup of all kinds of technology that is never fully untangled. A very large Corp with little tech debt is exceptionally rare. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is the rule.
Mid sized corps and late stage startups seem to be the sweet spot. Fairly low tech debt systems that is providing high value is still possible. This is where you have enough maturity to know what “good” looks like, and enough developers, momentum and budget to implement the vision.
Startups you want to see with fairly high tech debt. Tech debt there is a very often a sign of shipped code that is meeting some customer need. You do need to watch out for insane tech debt that may be hard to undo later on (running everything in an ancient proprietary language for example).
Startups with low tech debt often are devs navel gazing without a lot of revenue coming in. This is surprisingly true almost all the time.
Very large companies will tend to have a mashup of all kinds of technology that is never fully untangled. A very large Corp with little tech debt is exceptionally rare. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is the rule.
Mid sized corps and late stage startups seem to be the sweet spot. Fairly low tech debt systems that is providing high value is still possible. This is where you have enough maturity to know what “good” looks like, and enough developers, momentum and budget to implement the vision.