[makeitdouble]

I am not versed enough in car things, but it seems to me this would be something maintenance shops nailed down decades ago. How would they convey that your car is lacking maintenance even if you can still drive it to work ?

Perhaps we should go with "needs repair" or something like that ?

"Risk" feels like insurance territory (which goes along with "there is always some risk"), and a lot of people beautify the notion of taking risks to get higher gains.

[Cthulhu_]

The risk for a shoddy car is that you end up killing someone or get written up and charged with a violation. The risk for shoddy software (in most cases) is that you have an outage and suffer some financial or reputation damage, but that won't put you out of business.

There's laws against bad cars, there's no laws against bad software.

[squiggleblaz]

> There's laws against bad cars, there's no laws against bad software.

There's often privacy/data protection obligations, but they seem to be impossibly difficult to get the courts to pay attention to. If the average business owner would find themselves in legal shit every time an external party got access to their data (i.e. just being the victim of a ransomware attack puts you at risk of losing your home), they would probably pay more attention.

[giansegato]

Risk-taking is very cultural dependent, in some contexts people would avoid taking risks as their default option.

That said, I feel that car shops just work because, well, it's the law, especially in some countries.

In the end "needs repair" is the same as saying "mitigating accident risk".

[janstice]

More than needs repair - I think that a pretty good analogy for tech debt is deferred maintenance - if you don't change your oil or your tires the chances of expensive/bad problems increases. If you've got dents in the body you will need to address these before a respray.

And if you have a 15 year car with a clapped out motor, you are not going to achieve modern safety and fuel efficiency by swapping the worn-out motor with a NOS replacement, so there's a point where investing money in the old solution isn't going to move you into the future you need.

[OJFord]

And then we can scathingly label the most hated parts 'beyond economical repair'!