[joyfylbanana]

The biggest difference is, that with financial debt you basically always have to pay it back in a way or another. With technical debt in startup context, it happens very often that you don't have to pay it back (failures). It is quite logical why startup founders prefer to have technical debt, as the venture is risky in any case it is the kind of liability that you only have to pay if you are successful.

[jandrese]

Also, sometimes the things that developers consider "technical debt" end up working just fine and don't cause that much trouble.

There is always the urge to build something "the right way" where it's fully modular and extensible, but if you never need to extend something the additional layers of abstraction end up being more of a hindrance than a help.

There is a certain level of efficiency in building things the cheap and easy way by default and only rewriting the parts where it was actually a problem.

[bryanlarsen]

Exactly.

I've seen developers reduce technical debt in a way that others consider to be an increase in technical debt.

One developer can add abstractions, modularity and extensibility to a code to reduce technical debt.

Another developer can strip out unneeded abstractions, modularity and extensibility to reduce technical debt.

[ClumsyPilot]

Most developers cannot know ahead of time if a goven piece of code needs to be entensible.

Often noone does

[Swizec]

Layers of abstraction are the most common type of technical debt.

[marcosdumay]

> with financial debt you basically always have to pay it back in a way or another

Defaults exist. You don't always have to pay financial debt, and the case you described for technical debt is one of the main cases when people don't pay financial debts either.

IMO the biggest difference is that the carrying costs of technical debt are quite random. But people say that all the time already, and it's well known that they behave more like generic liabilities instead of debts in particular.

[plorkyeran]

Most startups shut down without ever having recouped the money which was invested in them. It's very unusual for a startup to fail without being in financial debt as most people will choose to keep trying to make things work until the money runs out.

[vorpalhex]

If you go bankrupt you don't have to pay back your financial debt either...