Jusqu’ici tout va bien
In the 1995 movie ‘La Haine’ a narrator tells the story of a a man jumping of a building and, while falling, telling himself ‘So far, everything went fine’. After all it’s the impact that will kill him and not the fall. In the movie this story serves as a parable for the French society failing to address its social issues within impoverished neighborhoods until the tensions caused by social injustices release in a violent clash. This way of addressing (or rather not addressing) obvious consequences of acting neglectful is a behavioral pattern, that occurs across cultures, classes and at any organizational scale. In the software industry this behavior is often accompanied by the utterance of the mantra
‘Never change a running system’
While in the short term you might coast along just fine (the fall), sticking with that motto will probably cause a catastrophe or a slow and steady decline down the line (the impact).
From a business perspective, you might have a unique idea that lets your company rise to the top by opening new markets. But sooner or later, other people will figure out the secret to your success und you will have to compete on a more and more saturated market for diminishing revenues or the demand will tail off as the public’s attention shifts.
Within the organization the ‘never change’-approach, can cause issues with staffing and people management. The most qualified employees will sooner or later leave an organization that prevents them from growing. The people that stay will strengthen the organizations disposition to avoid change. Once outside circumstances force the organization to adapt, it will be full of people that try to avoid change and are not up to date with the current state of technology. New hires that are skilled with the increasingly esoteric tech stack will be harder to find and very senior hence expensive. Junior hires’ skills will deviate further and further from your requirements causing excessive onboarding costs.
On a yet more granular scope, technical debt will build up over time and the cost of the changes required to adapt your system to an ever changing set of external dependencies will be way bigger than the sum of all the small incremental updates you could have done over the course of the years.
The underlining issue is the assumption that the never changing system is part of a constant world. But the world will change with utter indifference towards the system, while people assume that what they perceived in their formative years is an irrefutable truth.
You must change to keep up with a changing world.