On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital lost $440 million in 45 minutes.
Not a hack. Not market manipulation. Old code that should've been removed years earlier got pushed to production under deadline pressure. The SEC investigation didn't blame developers—it pointed to "inadequate technology governance." Executive function, not engineering function.
Yet when your system crashes at 2 AM, the morning standup still asks: "What did the team do wrong?"
The Number That Should Piss You Off
Technical debt in the US costs $1.52 trillion annually (CISQ, 2022). McKinsey says it accounts for 20-40% of the entire value of most companies' tech estate.
Here's the thing: every piece of technical debt traces back to a business decision.
Someone approved the deadline without time for testing. Someone rejected the hiring request. Someone cut refactoring because "users don't see it."
Those decisions happened in budget meetings, not sprint planning. But when consequences arrive, the postmortem happens in a retro where nobody in the room had authority to prevent the problem.
Agile Ceremonies as Blame Shields
The daily standup asks "What's blocking you?" — which makes it your blocker. Nobody asks who decided to staff the API team at 60% capacity.
Sprint planning is where technical work dies. "Can we do that refactor next sprint?" Next sprint never comes.
Retros ask "What can we do better?" — presupposing the team is the right unit of improvement. But "we keep getting pulled into production support" is a staffing decision. "Requirements changed mid-sprint" is leadership failure. "No time for code review" is deadline pressure from above.
You can't retrospective your way out of systematic under-resourcing.
83% of Developers Report Burnout
Haystack Analytics found 83% of devs experience burnout. Top reasons: high workload, inefficient processes, unclear goals.
Not "code is hard." Not "technology is complex."
Stack Overflow 2024 says technical debt is the #1 cause of developer frustration. Stripe found devs spend 33% of their time on maintenance instead of building.
That's one-third of your engineering budget paying interest on decisions made above your pay grade.
The Case Studies
Knight Capital (2012): $440M lost in 45 minutes. Old code, no deployment controls. Company sold within months.
Equifax (2017): 147 million people exposed. Known vulnerability, patch available for months, never applied. $700M+ in fines.
Southwest (2022): 16,000 flights canceled. Decades-old crew scheduling system leadership had been warned about for years. $740M+ in costs.
All three had risk management processes. What they didn't have was leadership willing to act on what those processes surfaced.
What Now?
If you're an engineering leader, start documenting the decision chain. Every cut to technical investment, every deadline set without eng input, every denied hire—write it down with dates and names.
Not for blame. For visibility. When consequences arrive, show it was a predicted outcome of a specific decision, not an engineering failure.
I wrote a full breakdown of this problem — including how Risk Management Theater lets executives check governance boxes without actually reducing risk, what metrics leadership should actually own, and specific tactics for translating technical debt into language that gets budget.
Read the full article: Code Quality Is a C-Suite Problem →
If you're tired of taking blame for predictable outcomes of executive decisions, check out The Anti-Agile Manifesto. You're not crazy. The system is broken by design.
What's your experience? Ever been blamed for an outage that was really a resourcing failure? Drop it in the comments.
Top comments (0)