| I happened to write a comment giving my understanding of technical debt 27 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27720078 FTA: Debt repayment has one vital characteristic: it is easy to understand. Debt repayment has three properties that are straightforward to grasp — principal amount, interest rate, and term (i.e., length of time to repay). I think the author is making an argument that it isn't really debt based on a failure to understand debt. Actual debt isn't really somehow magically simpler and more straight forward than technical debt. It's kind of a bet that taking this hit now will pay off enough that it will be worth it. It's a context based decision that compares a hypothetical path over time and guesses what will get the greatest overall benefit. There is a saying in the military: Sometimes, a 90 percent solution now is better than a 100 percent solution later. Life is a series of bets always based on partial information where we try to navigate our way through this one-way time travel adventure where we all move inexorably into the future minute by minute without knowing exactly what will happen. Choose poorly and things can really go to hell. Choose wisely and you can see life get better. There's always some luck or randomness involved. Whether it's a good decision or a bad one will depend in part on if the future takes the direction you think it will. Actual financial debt is no less complicated than technical debt. Someone who is more programming literate than I am could probably come up with some equivalent mental model for how technical debt gets repaid: "There are three components to repaying technical debt..." The real issue in both cases is the question "Is it good debt or bad?" In other words, (for technical debt) did this decision to do something quick and dirty provide more value than it will cost to clean up later? For money, it's theoretically easy to put numbers to the road not taken. In practice, it's a lot harder. It's relatively easy when it's a hypothetical model. Real life has other factors that get hard to fully account for, especially if you have to justify it to someone else whose views of what is pertinent may differ dramatically from yours. |