[phendrenad2]

We sound like idiots because we treat businesspeople like idiots. We parrot a definition of tech debt we got from a blog post. The whole analogy to debt is a hand-wavy joke of a definition anyway. It's not debt, it's a liability that's depreciating the assets of the company intellectual property.

The only reason it looks like debt is because it compounds, which is ironically something people don't really focus on when discussing it with management. People don't want to look incompetent so they say "Feature X took 3x as long as it should have, because we had some tech debt". It's implied that the tech debt is resolved. But in most cases the reality is, the time was spent just working around the tech debt, and the tech debt is not resolved. And now you've entrenched even more workarounds and hacks that will make things worse. Compound interest baby.