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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
The term “technical debt” was first coined by Ward Cunningham. Analogous to financial debt, technical debt describes how decisions we make lead to problems that get increasingly more difficult to fix over time, continually reducing our available options in the future—even when taken on judiciously, we still incur interest.
As Christopher Little, a software executive and one of the earliest chroniclers of DevOps, said, “Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.”§
business leaders are far more reliant upon the effective management of IT in order to achieve their goals than they think.**
Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood. This can create the condition of learned helplessness, where people become unwilling or unable to act in a way that avoids the same problem in the future.
