[watwut]

An individual engineer can know whether this cut corner is nicety, something with mild impact or something that will stand in away. CTO does not and should not make these low level decisions. Managing fuzzy information is the key to managing technical debt.

Not all technical debt is result of time pressure. A lot of it is lack of knowledge/experience (doing something new), organizational mess, maverick coder, competing visions among coders over architecture, confident senior with influence that is forcing others to produce bad code, demotivated coders, incentives etc etc.

Deciding whether this specific cut corner is not so much CTO job, big picture is CTO job.