Prosper, which I did business with from both sides of their market (successfully), was often comprehensively mismanaged. Example: for years, they described the way to calculate the return of a portfolio of loans as the interest rate minus the default rate.
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They also got dinged by the SEC some years ago for selling securities unlawfully, and their strategy in response to this was to go Bond villain, which, while amusing, does not generally reduce the SEC’s desire to bring enforcement actions.
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For historical context, this was the issue which first caused me to start commenting on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377347
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My usual example is the Ariane 5 rocket, which exploded due to technical debt it inherited from the Ariane 4 software.
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The Therac 25 is another example of inherited technical debt. Though in that case it killed people.
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Most of the times people are asking "Is the cost of technical debt infinite", and answer "yes". The mistake here is they didn't pay down the technical debt long after it makes sense to. Racking it up was almost definitely the right choice at the time...
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Much like annuities, tech debt gives you an upfront benefit in exchange for making regular payment - until death, of the product or its platform. Can be very profitable given high product mortality rate
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So they went at least 3 years (2014 to 2017, but probably longer) without paying anyone to work on the code in question. At SF salaries (plus mgmt, overhead, etc.) a $3 MM fine might be a wash.
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Perhaps, if you ignore reputational damage and possible loss of future work.
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"In the review, Prosper also learned that its current employees did not fully understand the operation of the older, legacy code." ... when you forget about the living maintenance cost of your features, code archeology becomes a crucial part of your businesspic.twitter.com/fxHQeZiHOU
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