[vigilant]

The reason the debt metaphor is used for technical debt is that debt isn't necessarily a bad thing - it just something to understand and manage.

Most people, when they buy a house, go into debt (e.g.: a mortgage) for the initial purchase - without that debt, they would never be able to save up the money needed to buy that house.

A startup seems similar - the first goal of a startup should be to show traction and market fit before running out of runway - and if building up technical debt lets them achieve that more quickly, then that is the right thing to do. This first phase seems to be where the 10x programming would shine.

[pacala]

Great point. Debt is a necessary part of bootstrapping a new project. That being said, technical debt is not a blanket excuse for violating elementary engineering precepts, shipping shoddy components full of bugs or a necessary evil part of the final product. The team must be able to be specific about the technical debt and execute a reasonable plan to repay it.

[mpbm]

Technical debt actually isn't a great metaphor. It breaks down too quickly, as in this case. You don't have to "repay" technical debt. It's not really debt.

A company only needs to build something that works. If it works in spite of violating elementary design precepts, shoddy components, bugs, and necessary evil, then it still works. The only thing that matters is the result. Investing resources into optimizing it so that it works better than necessary is merely an option, whereas getting it to work wasn't.

The iron triangle includes cost and schedule in addition to performance. If it would take more money or time than you have to make it perform better, then it just won't, because you don't have that much money or time. A product that frightens the maintainers, but keeps the lights on, is a good result.

Of course, you might optimize yourself into a local maximum if you're weak on strategy. That's why nearly every organization in the world has some kind of separation between "officer/executive" and "enlisted/staff" in the hierarchy. Someone needs to balance the triangle and someone needs to write code and there isn't enough time for the same person to do both.