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Comment by jrott | Hacker News Reader

Tech debt is a bad metaphor. Having lots of debt can be a smart business decision. The problem is usually engineers do a terrible job telling the story around why having lots of tech debt will cause problems. Usually if you've got non technical managers the best case is they've lived though it before and know.

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Debt is a good metaphor. Carrying technical debt can be a smart business decision. Constantly taking out more loans and never making payments leads to bankruptcy.

In my experience the problem is usually it's hard to quantify the costs. It's easy for managers to tell themselves engineers are just perfectionists. Someone's bonus might depend on not listening and they probably won't be held accountable when something goes wrong.

And bankruptcy is just the extreme of debt. It's also possible to survive, but be slowed by the drag of debt.

Financial debt reduces profit, which slows expansion and reinvestment.

Technical debt does the same, but slows novel development or expansion of the system.

Actual debt has a few major differences with tech debt though. First it's easy to quantify the cost of. Second and more importantly where it's good and bad are almost the opposite of where tech debt is good and bad. You want to use debt for financing when you have a relatively stable mature business where as when things are still uncertain you want to use equity.

Conversely both have the same basic effect: they magnify the consequences of decisions. Fiscal debt is essentially a multiplier on your sensitivity to revenue changes. Tech debt is a multiplier on delivery time for new features, or your sensitivity to changes in the platform's assumptions.

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