Isn’t the point of using the phrase “technical debt” that you should be doing this? It’s an idealistic phrase, not one that’s supposed to apply to every organization.
I rarely hear "technical debt" in the context of "let's incur some technical debt now so we can deliver this ticket quickly", it's rather "we can't deliver this ticket quickly now because somebody (usually somebody else) incurred technical debt" in the past.
If management is using it usually an attempt to shut discussion down in the context of (i) poor psychological safety on the part of devs because (ii) management doesn't trust anything the devs say because (iii) management knows that the devs are reading cargo-cult blog posts like "if this software was written in Haskell it wouldn't have any bugs".
It applies to every organization. You have to take some of it on unless you turn minerals into revenue using only processes and systems that can be recreated from scratch at will irrespective of who your employees are. Since no one can do that, everyone has it.
Taking it on unnecessarily is bad for the health of the business and worse than financial debt because technical debt, unlike financial debt, is not fungible.
Right, but what I mean is, not every organization out there is actually modeling their tech debt as debt. If you're using the word "tech debt" without doing calculations like "what interest am I paying on this?" or "what's my per-sprint payment if I want to fix this over the next 2 months", then you are using the phrase wrong. It's just a TODO at that point
If management is using it usually an attempt to shut discussion down in the context of (i) poor psychological safety on the part of devs because (ii) management doesn't trust anything the devs say because (iii) management knows that the devs are reading cargo-cult blog posts like "if this software was written in Haskell it wouldn't have any bugs".