Somewhere in your organization right now, one of your developers is screen-sharing their terminal to a teammate and explaining a workaround so absurd it sounds like a prank.
Someone else is fixing the same flaky test for the third time this week, hoping no one asks why it keeps failing.
Your new hire is quietly panicking because the app runs locally on everyone else's machine (but not theirs), and they've run out of ideas for fixing it but all the senior folks are busy with a firefight right now.
You aren't going to see any of this in a status report. It won’t show up in a retro. But your team carries these broken things every single day.
What might surprise you, though: They’re not labeled "showstoppers". They’re not bugs in Jira with red tags for urgency. They’re not even considered “blockers” anymore.
They're just the way things are.
Over time, people stopped noticing them. They stopped flagging the weirdness, the hacks, the slowness. They memorized the right incantation, or bookmarked the one wiki page that still sort of helps. Sadly, they stopped reporting friction: partially because no one seemed to be listening when they tried to share about it, and partially because they’ve already learned to work around it.
The broken things didn’t go away... they just got absorbed into the job.
The Broken Things We Can't See
The real problem with broken things isn’t that they exist, but that we’ve stopped questioning them.
- We don’t see a brittle test suite anymore; we see “the usual dance” before merging.
- We don’t see a deployment pipeline that fails silently; we see “it's been like that forever.”
- We don’t see the 'excessive' in excessive onboarding time; at first it was just an extra couple of days that grew to weeks that grew to... “it's just how long it takes to ramp up.”
The Broken Things are compounding interest on a loan we never meant to take out.
We talk all the time about "Technical Debt"... but what about "Technical Interest Payments"?
Carrying Broken Things Causes Behavioral Changes
As if these hidden interest payments aren't painful enough, we have to consider the psychological effects of carrying the Broken Things for a long time.
Unreliable Test Suite? They'll stop writing tests. "It's just not worth dealing with it."
Broken Feedback Loops? They'll stop raising issues. "Nothing's going to change, why bother?"
Broken Onboarding Process? People stop investing in improvements because once they've onboarded themselves... it no longer affects them.
Over time, the workaround becomes the process.
The workaround becomes the culture.
The tragedy isn’t just the wasted effort; it’s that we don’t even realize we’re wasting it. Because we’ve already baked the pain into our timelines, our rituals, our expectations. The entire team is carrying weight they didn’t sign up for… and pretending it’s just part of the hike.
It's their day-to-day, and they don't even know it hurts anymore.
Disgusting, isn't it?
What Do We Do With the Broken Things, Then?
Most teams aren’t suffering from a lack of technical skill—they’re suffering from cultural blindness. We’ve normalized friction. We’ve absorbed the pain. And somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting things to get better.
But there are ways to begin unburdening your team!
Make friction visible. Give teams a lightweight, anonymous way to log the things that waste their time, break their focus, or make them dread a task. You’re not looking for perfect reports—you’re listening for repeated sighs.
Reward the fixers. The person who removed three steps from a flaky setup script just saved every dev an hour. Call that out. Visibility breeds motivation.
Track velocity leaks—not just features shipped. If your team is spending half their sprint fighting tooling, that’s not “just how it goes.” That’s a systems failure in your organization.
Re-onboard yourself. Go through your own dev setup, your CI pipeline, your incident process... as if you were new. Take notes. Feel the pain. Then do something about it.
None of this is glamorous. It won’t show up on a roadmap. But neither did the broken things. They just… appeared. Quietly. Collectively.
And that’s how you get rid of them, too.
Bit by bit. Fix by fix. Until the sighs stop, and the work gets lighter.
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