totally wrote on Feb 14
th, 2014 at 6:04am:
that have been completely ignored as "low business priority", usually related to technical debt that both I and the testers know will cause infinite misery in the future, if not for us, then for whichever poor sod comes after who has to maintain and re-test the shit lasagna being piled onto our plates by bureaucrats.
Yeah, this happens often, and it's usually the result of a shortsighted manager/corporate culture that truncates the cost equations way too early.
If you don't factor in the extra effort to make additions around buggy systems, re-testing costs, customer support costs, and loss of customers in the future, many very expensive bugs look quite cheap to live with. And they are - for a little while.
If you plan to pad your resume and get out in a year or two, or at least be prepared to abandon ship as soon as your poor decisions start catching up with you, that approach can be profitable for the individual. The problem is, it isn't really best for the company in the long haul.
I think a lot of what Rowan is struggling under is the technical debt (nice phrase!)

left. But unfortunately, he still seems to be running a deficit rather than working to pay down the debt. I think he's running a smaller deficit, but still a deficit.
Maybe running a deficit at this point and hoping for an effective stimulus really is the best option he has left, but I know for me and the crowd I play with, nothing he's talking about is likely to get us to spend again as long as the problems are still there. So putting new stuff before fixes results in cost - cost - payoff, but putting fixes before new stuff would be cost - payoff - cost.
Oh well, I'm actually looking forward to maintenance mode, I'll get to spend more time playing and less time trying to figure out how to work around what they just meddled with.