this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Death by Technical Debt (piefed.social)
submitted 2 weeks ago by MaitreMortem681@piefed.social to c/sysadmin@lemmy.world
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Currently working at a small manufacturing business that is drowning in the "we've always done it this way..." mentality and I just hope I can get out of here before it bites them in the ass.

Anyone got experiences with technical debt or outdated IT practices snowballing into a complete disaster? Surely companies can't limp along indefinitely... right?

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[โ€“] comador@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Technical Debt:

  1. Current company is running one of its main databases on Oracle 13 because they refuse to pay Uncle Larry a dime, but also cannot migrate it (Oracle eBusiness Suite EBS).

  2. Last company made copies of all customer servers hard drives and kept them in a cold vault. So, they had to maintain systems dating back to the 1980s to current in order to recover data from drives in cold storage. The local data recovery company loved them too as drives freeze up and don't spin after a while. They went under during Covid citing operational issues.

Was fun having a sun 2 pizzabox, a Sun Ultrasparc 10, an SGI Orion and a series of x86 systems on my desk all the time though.

  1. A power company whose name I cannot share insisted on having 5 access and control rooms per power plant (most usually have 2-3 per plant) for redundancy. It drove them to near bankruptcy in the 2010s because of their tech debt trying to keep them all in sync world wide. Coolest part: I setup 20 x 70" Plasma TVs as a single C&C panel for their HQ back in 2007 using 3 Matrox video cards.
[โ€“] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 weeks ago

A power company whose name I cannot share insisted on having 5 access and control rooms per power plant (most usually have 2-3 per plant) for redundancy. It drove them to near bankruptcy in the 2010s because of their tech debt trying to keep them all in sync world wide.

Ugh. Utilities are where innovation goes to die.