[dccoolgai]

As en engineer I understand and agree with what the author is saying: technical debt is a loaded term and it feels wrong to throw it around liberally to cover things that should have discrete and distinct meanings. However: the term "technical debt" is not for engineer-to-engineer communication: it is for communicating to management and other non-technical actors - and in that role the term perfectly suits its purpose.

To understand why, let's consider a normal interaction with a corporate legal team. The content team submits some copy to the legal team for approval and the legal team needs to communicate to the content team that they can't make the claim they are trying to make about the product. Now, it's more true in the technical sense for legal to say things like "Section 3 paragraph 7 of the Fair Sales Act states that Consumer Entities as defined in Section 1 Paragraph 3 may not represent their products in such a way as to potentially mislead a Purchaser as defined in Section 2 paragaph 9. Furthermore this issue has been thoroughly litigated at both the federal appellate and Supreme Court levels which have reinforced those interpretations unfavorable to the aforementioned Consumer Entity." But that wouldn't be great for either department. It's more useful for Legal to just say "You can't claim that - we'll get sued." In a similar way, it's more useful as a software engineer to just say "that decision will add to our technical debt" than to try and discuss the minutiae of how a certain bad architecture decision will make the system "resistant to change". As a fellow engineer, I'd rather have the latter conversation with you and the one about "technical debt" with my business manager.