The team I’m on at work currently has a remote developer. He’s very good, but he lives in another country, and is technically a contractor and not a full employee. That means there are restrictions on what he can and can’t have access to or do for us. These limits have started me wondering, at what point is a remote developer’s ability to contribute so limited that it limits their value to the organization as a whole?
Software development is all about making tradeoffs. Sometimes, we do stuff because it’s quicker and get things out of the door faster, not because it’s the best option long-term. Do software development long enough, and you’ll learn the term “technical debt” – which is formally defined on Wikipedia as “a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution”. A more informal, but probably just as accurate definition could also be “the price(s) you’re paying now to have shipped things earlier.” Here’s the thing, most of the time we do something that incurs technical debt, we know it then. It’d be nice if there’s a way for us to log the decisions we made, and the debt we incurred so we can factor it into planning and regular development work, instead of trying to pay it off when there’s no other alternative.