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The Hidden Tax of "Cheap" Developers

2026-01-06Yash Rawat

The $50/hr Illusion: You hire a developer for $50/hr to save money. They take 3 weeks to build what a $200/hr architect builds in 3 days. Result: You paid the same amount, but lost 2.5 weeks of market opportunity.

Technical Debt as High-Interest Credit

Cheap code isn't free; it's a high-interest loan. Every hardcoded variable, every skipped test, and every copy-pasted block creates "entropy."

My System Suddhi audits consistently find that 60% of an enterprise's IT budget goes to servicing this "interest payments" (debugging, patching, manual workarounds) rather than new value.