Technical Debt
My only bone of contention is that taking on debt is usually a conscious choice. Technical debt to my mind is the price of making a pragmatic decision, it’s the trade-off that lingers.<p>Making poor architectural decisions or writing poor quality code isn’t tech debt. They are just institutionalised consequences. The way the world now works.<p>Legacy code isn’t tech debt either: it was right for the time.<p>What you have instead is knowledge debt as engineers turn over, and the once intuitive and elegant parts of the codebase are utterly alien to the new hires who learned their craft in a totally different way. This isn’t tech debt because engineers can’t intuitively anticipate the business’s future hiring decisions, particularly when those are made independently of the team.<p>If you want to establish tech debt you have to define the schedule to pay it off and there should be some record of that work somewhere, with accountability attached. It is not merely the accumulation of things you don’t like the look of or find hard to work with.<p>Similarly, I think MVP is a conscious choice to incur product debt because it is far too risky and irresponsible to go all-in with your perfect vision right off the bat. You want your initial buy in and a chance to bail out or pivot before all is lost.<p>Edit: as an example that comes to mind, a bank running on COBOL doesn’t have tech debt unless their COBOL engineers are aware of their missed opportunities. If they think COBOL is no longer fit for purpose, it’s not debt, it’s time to reinvest.