Engineer Who Wrote "TODO: fix later" in 2014 Promoted to VP of Engineering
The comment, still present in the codebase, is now referred to internally as "the roadmap."
SAN FRANCISCO — Payment platform Ledgerly announced Wednesday that Priya Venkataraman, a senior staff engineer whose 2014 code comment "// TODO: fix later, this is a hack" remains the load-bearing core of the company's transaction reconciliation system, has been promoted to vice president of engineering.
"Priya has shown exactly the kind of long-term thinking we need at the executive level," said CEO Tom Ashford. "Twelve years ago she saw a problem, documented it, and made the strategic decision to move on. That problem processes $40 billion a year now. That's vision."
The comment sits above a 300-line function that three separate engineering teams have attempted to refactor, each of which produced a design document, a migration plan, and, ultimately, a second comment reading "see above." The most recent attempt, in 2024, ended when the team lead was promoted to director on the strength of the design document.
Venkataraman said she was honored by the promotion and had "genuinely intended to fix it." She added that she now understands the comment as "less of a task and more of a philosophy," and that as VP she plans to formalize it as a company value: "Ship, annotate, ascend."
Junior engineers at the company said the promotion had clarified something for them. "I spent my first year here trying to remove tech debt," said one. "Now I understand that tech debt is a form of tenure. You leave a hack, you write 'later,' and then you wait. Later is when you're VP."
The company confirmed that the function will be rewritten as part of a "modernization initiative" scheduled for 2028, and that the initiative's charter document contains the sentence "scope to be finalized later."