[lucasyvas]

Totally on point, but if I may offer a twist:

Say you run a large plumbing company, and you discover your plumbers took shortcuts on a particular job that resulted in an abundance of leaks for a given project.

The plumbing company cannot ask the plumbers for their pay back. They will have to eat the cost and fix the plumbing.

So, it's the business's problem either way. They can additionally choose to fire those plumbers if they want, which is line with your point of not believing the plumbers had no idea.

But it's still the company's debt to pay. They made the mistake of hiring people that were not capable of surfacing risks.

[Pamar]

"They made the mistake of hiring people that were not capable of surfacing risks."

Exactly the problem we always deal with: Business tends to distrust Tech because we always seem unable to stay on top of things we build ourselves

[Notanothertoo]

There are two types of tech debt in my experience, things get out of date because they weren't maintained and it's harder to do now years later than absorbing some of that work a little at a time throughout the years. And the other kind is because of poorly written code which is often caused by poor business practices and changing requirements.

[Pamar]

I don't now what your experience is regarding sw development (especially corporate): - in my experience technical debt is often due to:

"There is never enough time to do it right, there is always time to do it twice"