In a previous company, I had to support TypeScript code that wouldn't even survive 12 months without something breaking upstream. Granted there were a lot of other things that company did wrong...a hell of a lot! But it's insane how little importance people seem to place on code longevity these days.
I’m not on about fixing tech debt. That’s a completely different problem to picking boring technologies that don’t need constant ongoing maintenance just to keep running.
Tech debt is going to happen regardless of the technologies you pick. But some technologies require more effort to keep up-to-date than others.
I’d also argue that keeping technologies up-to-date isn’t “tech debt”. It’s operational overhead. Tech dept is something else entirely.
In my experience, tech debt often requires too great an investment to fix so the team just ends up bikeshedding to show progress but without real benefits.
Look at C. Each revision has added a bunch of minor fixes but has never addressed the core issues of the language that realistically require a rewrite (function pointer syntax, undefined behavior, null safety).
And there’s the fact that features bring in money and tech debt simply doesn’t. It’s still a business at the end of the day.
