My previous job had an excessive amount of technical debt in it's core product. So much so that simple code changes that should have taken a few hours were now taking days, or in some extreme cases weeks. For example there were financial calculations that should have been confined to one class and treated like a black box, but over time bits of the calculation had spread out all over the application from the front end, the server layer and in to the DB. A simple change had a ripple effect on other parts of the application which made bug hunting and testing a slow and laborious process.

After much grumbling from the devs the CEO prepared a presentation where he told us technical debt was our friend. We had a choice to pay down the debt, or add new features. New feature would get us more customers, and more income, which would mean we could hire more developers to eventually pay down the debt. I felt it was a very wishfull thinking type of argument. We were having increasing numbers of outages due to the lack of a proper testing process in our CI pipeline and our DB was massively overloaded. Adding new feature was literally adding to our technical debt and increasing our risk of outages, something that wouldn't help get new customers.

My issue with the above argument is that the problem with debt isn't the amount or type, but the person holding the debt. A 30-something in a safe job (e.g. doctor) earning €100k a year can safely hold €300k of debt, so long as they are responsible and always strive to reduce the amount owed.

A 20 year old working in a fast food joint on minimum wage, but holding €50k of debt is in serious danger. They aren't in a stable job and they aren't being responsible.

Some companies are like the doctor. They have debt, but are responsible and actively work to reduce it. Some are like the 20 year old who thinks that they can deal with it later, oblivious to the rising interest and danger they are putting themselves in.