Simple Hidden Correlation Between Instant Gratification and Technical Debts

Human brain is hardwired to place a high value on decisions that have immediate impacts. Just like other species, our ancestors spent their days to think of how to neutralize threats, such as securing the next meal, avoid a predator or finding a shelter to sleep. Actually, the way we live has taught us to take actions that have instant and clear results — it is called instant gratification.

By digging into such attitude of achieving pleasure without delay, we will realize that our brain gets used to prefer quick payoffs and the distant future becomes less of a concern.

How instant gratification plays role in technical debts?

In many software projects we have seen that most of the times easy quick solutions are chosen rather than ones with a better approach that would take longer. this is exactly the moment we are using technical debts to move projects forward by accepting the implied cost of additional rework in the future.

As a software developer you might have been wondering why would some developers deliver software without having automated tests if they know it decreases the team’s confidence to make rapid changes in the future? Why would someone commit poor quality codes into code base when it causes additional rework and technical debts in the future?

The answer of such questions heavily rely on a phenomena named time inconsistency. In fact, the way brain evaluates outcomes of our actions is inconsistent across time. The pleasure of the software working right now even with a poor internal quality is worth more than one that is merely possible in the future. Since the costs of delivering software with a poor quality code is delayed for the future, our brain prioritize immediate enjoyable outcomes of delivering a software even with a lot of technical debts.

Attention that we are talking about correlation not causation.

Actually, this article aimed to mention some observations about relation of technical debts and our desire to want things now. of course there are many other dynamics around us which leads us to use technical debts in our development phase (because technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing), such as time or budget limitation or other kind of uncertainties in our project environment.