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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Except it doesn't. It's a one-sided and misleading concept.

The problem is usually finding a balance between "Let's hack some suicidally awful crap together quickly to see if we even have a market and then fix it when we have real income, except everyone knows we won't so it will be a permanent drag on the business" and "Let's build a beautiful extendable maintainable paragon of elegance and purity and ignore the fact that it'll take three years when we have six months of runway."

Too far in either direction will kill you. The sweet spot is between those extremes, and finding it is extremely difficult.

It's unhelpful that there isn't a word to describe aiming for that balance, never mind hitting it.

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It's not one-sided though. Debt is often a very useful tool. You take on debt now because you can do more productive things with the money that will be worth more than the payments you have to make on it later. This is an extremely apt description of technical debt. Often times people will make bad decisions about what debt to take on, and the same is true for technical debt, and often times people will overestimate the value they'll get out of the debt, which is again true for technical debt, but debt is still a useful tool, and technical debt is a useful compromise you make to ship software.

Your description is apt when you are talking about an analogy between technical debt and personal debt.

For companies, whether to use debt or equity to finance their balance sheet is just a technical decision. Either way, you have to pay the cost of capital.

(Ie even if you finance your project from equity and not from debt, it still has to be better for your shareholders than just giving them the necessary capital back via a stock buyback.)

A company can have debt as a permanent feature of its balance sheet, just like equity.

Funny enough, I suspect from a corporate finance point of view, technical debt should actually be called 'technical equity', because technical debt only gets expensive when your project takes off. If you never end up using that piece of code, the technical debt never has to be paid. But it gets more and more expensive, the more successful your project is.

Just like selling 50% of your startup to an investor (as equity) gets more and more expensive (in retrospect), only if your startup really takes off. Debt stays the same price, whether your startup is middling or goes to the moon.

I get why Technical Equity is a better term, but very few % age of the population really understand what Equity means, while debt can be explained to a 5 year old

Yes. Though I wouldn't even say it's a 'better term'; just because the metaphor might hold slightly more water in some highly technical sense, doesn't actually make it a better term. ;)

This reminds me: if you went to a farm and actually 'picked the low hanging fruit first', they would likely fire you. The fruit higher up on the tree typically ripens faster, so should be picked first. (But the phrase as a metaphor is fine, and everyone knows what it's supposed to mean.)

It's usually only a "beautiful extendable maintainable paragon of elegance and purity" in the eyes of the original architect. Everyone else sees it as leaking abstraction with bolts everywhere to keep the original idea somewhat working... Or just a massive pile of technical debt.

Code quantity is always dependent on how well the person making this judgment understands the software. While I'm sure that everyone will agree that there are some clearly better ways of doing things, they sure as hell won't all agree on what these clearly better ways are.

One person's pile of garbage is the next person's perfect implementation with easy to understand procedural logic.

Please take note that I'm explicitly not saying that any implementation is better then another. I'm just trying to convey that the term technical debt very much depends on the mindset of the person looking at the implementation

How is debt not accurate here?

You wanna build something? You may over-invest (too much debt), invest just right (manageable debt) or wait until it's too late (the paragon you mention).

Debt is a nasty word and it's meant to be but like some other bad things if you know what you can manage you can come out on top. People take loans all the time because they want to achieve that sweet spot you mention.

Take on lots of debt and you'll have a quick flash and then years of problems. Refuse to take on any debt ever and you may never get to university or buy a house.

Taking on debt is not inherently good or bad, it's context dependent.

I feel it maps to technical debt very well.

Ah, thank you, this is actually the argument, not what the article said.

Unfortunately I've become a bit disillusioned that we can reclaim the conversation to be about the optimal level of quality, and what tradeoffs are acceptable.

Office bullshit language seems to have strangled nuance so hard that I'm now sure that most of these conversations are useless and we'd better spend our focus on finding and working with mature adults that don't need that much convincing

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