The Hidden Technical Debt Crisis - When Non-Engineers Write Code

Explore the emerging crisis of technical debt created when non-engineers write code in this 11-minute conference talk from ACCU 2025. Learn how increasingly accessible coding languages and AI tools are enabling traditionally non-technical roles to write code, manage data, and automate workflows without formal software engineering training. Discover the challenges that arise when teams function like software engineering groups but lack foundational practices and tools for reliability, maintainability, and security. Examine the consequences including inefficiencies, avoidable errors, and unmanaged technical debt accumulation. Understand how software engineers can bridge the gap between necessity and expertise to prevent decades of software engineering progress from being lost. Gain insights from Felix Aldam-Gates, a problem-driven Software Engineer at the Office for National Statistics, who shares practical perspectives on addressing this growing phenomenon in modern development environments.