Debts, Tech and Otherwise

reforge has a great post where they classify the various types of debt in digital product development: maintenance debt, developer efficiency debt, stability debt, security debt, technical product debt, decision debt. https://www.reforge.com/blog/managing-tech-debt

Feels like we're stretching the metaphor when we apply it to things that won't necessarily compound in complexity or time required to fix it. This is often the case with technical stuff because things can depend on one another, but if you drop a bad process step, the time saved is probably linear since rarely do other teams need to change their process because you changed yours.

Debt is scary as a metaphor because the interest compounds and the bank can repo things, but if you just owe a guy $10, he's not gonna come after you years later with a $300,000 bill. Non-compounding bad decisions are "you owe a guy $X" while the compounding ones are "debt".

Maybe we should use "fees" and "debts" to differentiate these.

I can call an ink pen "a sword". I can even justify this by saying some nonsense like "pens are used to wage war". But if I rush headlong at a Samurai with nothing but a Bic Rollerball, I should not expect to come out of the encounter with all my limbs, much less the expectation of injuring the Samurai. Just calling it "a sword" doesn't mean it has anything to do with an actual sword.

"Tech debt" isn't debt. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the concept of debt. What people mean when they say "Tech debt" is really "I'm putting off work I know I should be doing now, until later, and I'm doing something else instead that I know I'lll need to undo" That's not debt. That's procrastination. That's delaying the inevitable. It ain't debt.

You don't pay off a car loan with procrastination. You don't decide to put off painting your house and then call that a loan.

"Tech debt" has nothing to do with interest, with a lienholder, a creditor, a payment plan, etc. There is nobody to call in the loan. There is no incremental payment. There is no credit. There is nothing whatsoever to do with the entire concept of debt, much less any of the actual practical real-world implications, actions, or actors, behind debt.

Please let's stop perpetuating this cargo cult myth. There is no such thing as "tech debt". There is only compromises and procrastination, and justifying regrettable decisions by pretending there's a good rationale for them. There isn't.

> Debt is an obligation that requires one party, the debtor, to pay money borrowed or otherwise withheld from another party, the creditor.

> The term can also be used metaphorically to cover moral obligations and other interactions not based on a monetary value. For example, in Western cultures, a person who has been helped by a second person is sometimes said to owe a "debt of gratitude" to the second person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt

"debt" means owing something to someone. non-compounding debt is still debt. i don't pay back a "debt of gratitude" with compound interest. i also don't pay back friends I owe money to for a restaurant bill with compound interest, even though i was in debt with them when they covered my part of the bill.

compounding/non-compounding is fine. don't over-complicate it.

Tech debt is such a flawed concept. There is no world where requirements 10 years later are the same as the MVP, or even foreseeable. You can never pay it off. Software is always changing.

Even if it were debt, debt is a tool to get you what you need today. And then you likely roll it into something down the line. Maybe you pay it off (and even then the asset still requires maintenance) Like a starter home, then upgrading to a larger home to start a family, etc, etc. Requirements and resources are in constant flux.