There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

The article argues that metaphors like a “sinking ship” understate the true risk of technical debt: unlike physical infrastructure, software has no natural floor beyond which it cannot deteriorate, so codebases can keep getting more complex, slower, and harder to change indefinitely. For CIOs and technology leaders, the strategic implication is that bad software may not cause an immediate collapse, but it steadily erodes agility, reliability, and cost structure—creating long-term business drag that can outlast multiple leadership cycles and migration attempts. IT organizations should recognize that technical debt is not self-limiting and that partial, repeatedly deferred remediation often compounds the problem by adding complexity without resolving root causes.