Technical debt as a lack of understanding
I've had to explain this to non-technical stakeholders many, many times over the years, and I always use the restaurant metaphor:If you run a commercial kitchen and you only ever cook food, because selling cooked food is your business -- if you never clean the dishes, never scrape the grill, never organize the freezer -- the health inspector will shut your shit down pretty quickly.Software, on the other hand, doesn't have health inspectors. It has kitchen staff who become more alarmed over time at the state of the kitchen they're working in every day, and if nothing is done about it, there will come a point where the kitchen starts failing to produce edible meals.Generally, you can either convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is more profitable in the long run or you can dust off your resume and get out before it burns down.