[moxious]

No, I wouldn't put it that way. It's not a problem to be embraced, it's just another variable to manage.

Just as there is the trilemma of "better, faster, cheaper: pick 2" there are others as well. Speed and tech debt are balanced against one another. It's not that I think we should embrace tech debt. I actually rather hate it. But sometimes I'm willing to trade to get to a business objective that is not related to technical elegance.

In terms of how to pay it off, it may sound like a cop-out but it just depends. The core problem is that things are always changing and we can't predict the future. So staying supple and flexible I think is the way to go. Pay off as much of it as you can when you can, but I think the main point for me is to keep the eyes on some business objective (where tech debt appears as only one variable in the equation) -- the main point is not to keep your eyes on the tech debt all the time.