Why Technology Debt Can Make Your Next IT Hire Cost $800K More Than It Should
- November 6, 2026
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In the previous blog, we found a problem that mostly sits beneath IT decisions: technology debt. Now it’s time to consider what this debt will really cost a growing business.
Technology debt occurs when legacy systems, poorly documented processes, workarounds, and hastily made infrastructure choices stay in place longer than they need to.
It doesn’t usually come in a single bill. Instead, it shows up as another patch. Another consultant. Another workaround. An additional hour to figure out why something that worked yesterday no longer works today.
Ultimately, the business pays the price.
A Manitoba firm was on the upswing of a rapid expansion. Sales were increasing. The business still had to catch up on technology, but the infrastructure was still considered more as a cost centre.
So, the company didn’t invest in the underlying environment; instead, it kept patching the systems it already had.
It sounds logical. “We can fix that for now.” Then something broke.
The issue was moving beyond IT. The brittle legacy environment had turned into a stumbling block for the business. Productivity was lost, operations slowed, and emergency consultants were brought in to repeatedly patch infrastructure issues over time.
Once the company solved the issue, the cost was $800,000 in lost productivity and emergency consulting.
The other option would’ve been completely different.
Earlier, a strategic IT leader was hired at about $200,000 per year who would have been able to assess the environment, set priorities, deal with the root cause issues in the infrastructure, and develop a technology plan for the company’s growth.
That doesn’t mean every technology problem needs a $200,000 executive.
What it comes down to is simply that you can make the wrong technology choice and the solution becomes very costly.
Technology debt doesn’t typically show up on the income statement. But you can feel it even though you can’t see it.
Employees take time to work around systems rather than using them.
Managers delay the decision to operate the system until technical issues are resolved.
External consultants are hired because nobody inside knows how the old system was set up.
And IT leaders are spending their time keeping yesterday’s environment alive, rather than preparing the business for tomorrow.
According to Statistics Canada, 45% of Canadian businesses invested in some form of digital infrastructure in the three years leading up to 2019, and 20.2% cited high implementation costs as their biggest challenge with using new or additional digital infrastructure.
Price is definitely a factor in the choice. However, delaying investment doesn’t always mean there’s no cost. Sometimes it just shifts that cost into a place harder to see.
This is where technology debt turns into a hiring challenge.
A company may think that it requires an IT manager, director or senior technical officer.
The job description and the salary are reasonable.
Then the candidate starts asking these questions:
“What is the infrastructure like?”
“How old are the core systems?”
“What documentation exists?”
“Who manages the vendors?”
“What has been delayed?”
“What is the technology roadmap?”
“Who makes the decisions?”
These questions matter because they assess the environment they’ll inherit. When the answers reveal years of technical debt, the position changes.
They are no longer asked to lead an IT function.
They may enter this repair situation with little power, few facts, and a myriad of issues no one wants.
This can make an already highly competitive hiring process even more challenging.
ICTC reported that the Canadian ICT workforce reached 2.14 million workers in 2024, with an unemployment rate of 3.9% compared with 6.3% across all other occupations.
Strong technical candidates do enjoy more choices.
Whether you intended it or not, your technology environment becomes part of the job offer.
- 1. What technology problems are we paying to postpone?
Look beyond major outages.
How many problems do you have to deal with manually? How often do employees need workarounds? What systems require a single individual to know how to operate?
Those are indicators that the business is already paying the price of technology debt.
- 2. What would a new IT leader actually inherit?
When hiring a senior IT person, make sure you know what they’re walking into.
A candidate being recruited might feel they are being hired to build a tech function, only to discover that the first year on the job will be spent deciphering vendor contracts, “black box” systems, obsolete infrastructure, and unscheduled “quick fixes”.
That misalignment can have a negative impact on recruitment and retention.
- 3. What happens if we wait another two years?
This is the question that often gets neglected.
Technology debt will only be harder to pay off as the business expands. The more people, customers, integrations, vendors, and processes that rely on the current environment, the more they are tied to it.
According to Statistics Canada, 28.3% of Canadian businesses said technology adoption and innovation helped them become more efficient over the last year.
Technology can be a growth enabler. But only when the foundation can support piloting technology on top of it.
The obvious cost of technology debt is technical. The less obvious ones are operational and human.
A delayed project will impact business income. A system failure can have consequences for customer service. A poorly documented environment can lead to more reliance on external consultants.
And when a senior IT hire leaves because the role becomes too exhausting, the business has yet another problem.
You cannot replace the person and get rid of the debt. It just rolls over to the next person.
The right technical leader doesn’t necessarily come in with an axe to chop down everything. That would create its own problems. Rather, they need to be able to identify the things that are working, the things that are creating risk, and the things that they can wait on safely.
They can establish priorities. They can document the environment. They can challenge unnecessary complexity.
Most of all, they can assist the business to make decisions on technology based on the direction the company is taking, rather than reacting to where it has been.
That’s the distinction between a job that’s done to keep an IT environment running and a job that’s done to lay the groundwork for growth.
Tech debt is seldom the result of one wrong move. It is typically built up via sensible choices made under stress.
“We will fix it after this project.”
“We do not need another IT person yet.”
“The system still works.”
Until it doesn’t.
Technology debt is too much for the IT manager to handle alone, which is why it’s a part of the executive discussion.
Are you stuck with legacy technology that is preventing business growth? The right IT leader can help level the foundation and provide direction for the business.
This is where the right recruitment partner can come in handy. Recruiting IT leadership isn’t simply a matter of scanning the right page of a job description and matching it to a résumé. At Lambert Nemec Group, there’s more to recruitment than just finding a résumé that fits the right section of a job description. It’s about business knowledge, understanding the challenges of that job and the type of leader required to get things moving.
