I like this article and mostly agree, with one caveat: Tech debt is riskier than financial, especially when planning to expand a team because the work to pay it down is often more effectively done by engineers who’ve been on a codebase for awhile, you can’t just hire a developer competent in a stack and say “pay down this tech debt.” You need some local knowledge to do so effectively. The same knowledge that organizations often have to spread thin during periods of team expansion, so when expanding, there’s less resources available to pay off tech debt and a bunch of new devs unfamiliar with local customs and idioms who can’t help but take out more tech debt.

Excellent article! The biggest problem with tech debt in this analogy is that we have no idea what the “interest rate” is. That is, once 1 unit of tech debt has been merged, how much more work (including cognitive overhead) does that inflict on average on future work? And how could we even quantify “1 unit of tech debt”?

I’m a loan shark for tech debt; don’t pay and expect a visit from a repo man.