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Comment by TheLastPass | Hacker News Reader

One important difference between tech debt and financial debt, is that if the project you accrued a bunch of tech debt in gets killed for unrelated reasons before it's completed, your debt is forgiven. You never pay it off, and you never have to.

When you're validating an idea, don't worry about making everything perfect. Worry about validating the idea. Once you're more confident that you're actually gonna do it long-term, then it starts being more beneficial to pay off the tech debt.

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I think what you're saying is the more common use of "tech debt", basically just using it as a synonym for "bad code". Don't worry about code quality, figure it out later.

It ignores the stronger debt analogy -- sure, there is a high chance that the idea fails. But if it succeeds and, all else being equal, you have taken on a less tech debt to get there, you will be able to iterate on and grow it more efficiently. So to the extent you're taking on debt, it should be an explicit trade-off to increase your chances of proving out the idea. Which is not the same as "don't worry about bad code at all."

From what I've seen, when it comes to talking about tech debt from an early prototype, it's often an excuse/euphamism to be considerate to the people that wrote it. The truth is often that it's just bad code due to them being inexperienced or lacking the skill or discipline to write better code. Which I don't mean as an insult, it seems like there's a strong inverse correlation between the kind of person who's passionate enough about product over tech, and is creative/naive enough to build and validate a brand new product, and the kind of person who understands enough to architect a great system and make the best tech debt trade-offs.

I absolutely agree - that's the whole point of the article and my comment. If you're in an experimental space, and 9/10 of your ideas are never going to make it to market, I'd rather spend 1 units of time on each to figure out which one's going to work, and then 20 units of time redesigning it the right way (i.e. 21 units of time to be done), rather than 10 units of time on each to make them all ready for production (i.e. 100 units of time to be done). But those ratios will vary depending on how sure you are about what needs to be done next, so yes - you've gotta weigh the cost / benefit.

> One important difference between tech debt and financial debt, is that if the project you accrued a bunch of tech debt in gets killed for unrelated reasons before it's completed, your debt is forgiven. You never pay it off, and you never have to.

This happens with financial debt as well. It's the risk that drives interest rates. Financial debt is abandoned (or restructured) when people or companies file for bankruptcy, when homes are foreclosed on, etc. Sure, it might ding your personal credit history in some cases, but financial debt is constantly abandoned at little or no cost to the borrower.

I thought interest rates were more driven by inflation. Mortgages are insured, for instance, removing much of the risk, but you pay for that insurance much of the time (THAT'S driven by risk), but $500,000 is worth more now than it will be in 30 years, so you're gonna have to pay to get it fronted to you.

Maybe a better word than "technical debt" is "rusty Ferrari".

Would you accept a free rusty Ferrari tomorrow? If it would take $60k in repairs to get into usable form, and probably not that great even if you put in those repairs, which you have no inclination to do, probably not. Especially if you couldn't easily sell it. If you were a broke college student and it was in roadworthy condition, and you had no other way to make it to your job - probably you would.

This captures that it's not really that you're "$60k in the hole" if you accept the free rusty Ferrari. In a sense, yes, you are.

I propose rusty Ferrari as the new, more precise term for technical debt. "We have a lot of rusty Ferraris in our garage" isn't a debt, but I think might capture the meaning. "I don't want a rusty Ferrari in my garage" = I don't want this technical debt. Let's make it work with some rusty Ferraris = let's cobble together a hack we should probably throw away.

what do you guys think?

There is no difference. Regular debt is also discharged in bankruptcy.

But that affects your ability to borrow in future, whereas a canceled project doesn't affect your ability to write rushed code in future. Unless you get fired, I guess...

You’re nit-picking when I think the analogy is clear but it doesn’t effect your credit if the company you work for declares bankruptcy, so the comparison to the company’s tech debt seems to hold up even if you push it.

The whole thread is nit-picking. The point of bankruptcy isn't "fuck being fiscally conservative - we don't even know we want the stuff we're buying so who cares if we can pay our credit card bills", whereas that's literally how you should approach some projects.

Commercial lending has this component as well. Any real estate operator working at scale will have some experience with giving this or that project back to the bank.

Isn't that more of a similarity than a difference? When financial debt gets overwhelming you can declare bankruptcy and abandon the project as well.

No. Bankruptcy doesn't just eliminate the debt and let you move on consequence-free - it's a legal process in which a plan is put in place for everyone to get their fair share of what's left, or to recover from the debt without the debt itself destroying future productivity. It can also be very detrimental to your credit opportunities. If you abandon a project, you're just never going to repay the debt or suffer from any consequences of it.

delete the whole code (or just throw away the keys) and all the debt is paid.

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