Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
This article repeats a meme, but is total BS.  It's similar to saying "the hidden costs of being a founder" and then stating that if you do ever make a successful exit, you will have a lot of your time wasted by having to select bedlinen and other hidden costs of having made an exit. (the hidden cost to being a founder - you will be forced to work unpaid hours shopping for luxury bedlinen.  so consider carefully.)  Well guess what: that's not real technical (or founder) debt!<p>The idea of calling this stuff technical debt is simply laughable.  there's no debt.  you don't owe shit.<p>hint: if you code something up in 20 minutes you still don't have to do all that other stuff, you can just ignore it, and throw away the twenty minutes of code if it's not better than not having it.  if you become a millionaire you don't have to do all that stuff, you can just ignore it.<p>Let me put it another way.  Say you're an MBA who can't code anything but excel formulas, yet you figured out how to get excel and powerpoint onto the web as a web app (wat).  you create something and get 5,000 paying users and raise a $500,000 investment.<p>Have you created technical debt? No.  You're at the same square as if someone gave you $500,000 to spend on developers against your mockups, except that you've validated them as well.  There's no debt here.  This article had it right:<p><a href="http://www.higherorderlogic.com/2010/07/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-its-an-unhedged-call-option/" rel="nofollow">http://www.higherorderlogic.com/2010/07/bad-code-isnt-techni...</a><p>The people that call this scenario (excel on the web) technical debt, think that somehow the MBA 'borrowed' the web app from a real dev, and now owes it in real development costs.  That's a wrong way to think about it.  In fact it's a ridiculous way to think about it.