Spotting scale blockers before they explode your timeline.
Technical debt is often treated like a mysterious force—intangible, invisible, and only detectable when it derails a roadmap. That doesn’t hold up.
Most engineering risk leaves visible traces. You don’t need access to the codebase to understand the problem. You just need to ask the right questions and look in the right places.
This is how I assess structural tech debt without reading a line of code.
What I Mean by Technical Debt
Technical debt is anything that slows down safe change. It hides in architecture, tooling, processes, and team structure. It’s easy to accumulate and hard to pay down if you don’t name it.
Not all debt is harmful. But when no one’s tracking it—or when it’s justified as normal—it tends to grow until it blocks delivery.
Where I Look Instead of the Code Here are the signals that consistently reflect engineering health:
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Release Cadence & Stability
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How often are releases shipped? Is rollback easy?
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DORA metrics offer a good baseline to benchmark against.
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Bug Patterns & Aging
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Which bugs have been open the longest? Are they tracked and triaged?
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Persistent bugs often reveal process gaps more than technical ones.
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Onboarding Friction
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How long does it take for a new hire to ship code?
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Extended ramp-ups usually point to documentation issues or implicit knowledge barriers.
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Bus Factor & System Ownership
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Who owns critical systems? Is that ownership shared?
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Risk concentration is easy to spot when no one can explain how something works.
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CI/CD Signals
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Are pipelines stable? How long do they take?
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If engineers avoid the CI, there’s probably a deeper problem.
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5 Questions I Ask in Every Audit
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How fast can you ship a safe hotfix?
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What’s the oldest unresolved bug?
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Can you test every critical path before merge?
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Who’s the single point of failure in your stack?
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What got delayed last sprint, and why?
These answers usually tell me more than a repo ever could.
You don’t need to audit code to assess engineering maturity. Look at how teams ship, recover, onboard, and coordinate. That’s where the real story lives.
