[zug_zug]

Sounds like there is rightly a lot of mistrust of technical debt (rightly because about half of the things one engineer calls technical debt "Rewrite that service in go" another engineer calls perfectly fine).

Perhaps it's best for everybody involved if we define "hard technical debt," which meets the highest criteria.

1. The interest is in measurable engineer-time (not risk, not user-experience, not sales, not satisfaction). E.G. "Every time we deploy it takes the scripts 30 minutes to run, and I can't switch focus for those 30 minutes"

2. The capital is in measurable time. "It would take 15 work hours to fix that script, with planning, debugging, documentation, etc"

With those two, we can calculate the annual interest rate at 173% (at 1 deploy per week).

This would help separate people who love doing rewrites because it's fun to put their name on things from actual "this is wasting my time every day" concerns.