[imtringued]

>Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave.

Uhm, no? You got it exactly backwards. Tech debt isn't the same as interest payments, tech debt is a future productivity decline, whereas interest payments require you to pay more than the initial money you borrowed.

If debt is expensive, then your goal is to pay it off quickly, since debt scales with the remaining principal and grows with interest. This means that you want to cut corners everywhere and incur tech debt. You do not want a long term investment in high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. Doing that will delay the payoff day. Each early payments reduce the principal, which reduces future interest payments.

In other words, it's a terrible time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. There also won't be a "next growth wave", because the growth wave is now. You're about to miss it if you invest in the long term.

[discreteevent]

You pay tech debt with compounding interest at exorbitant rates.

Another way to look at it is to say that like any analogy applied to software development it is weak. It is not like normal debt at all because you must start paying back immediately one way or another. So you can't just pile hack on hack and wait for a year to pay back. You will start having to pay back for the hacks within a couple of months because of the bugs you have to fix and how hard it is to work with the messy codebase. In some cases you may even grind to a halt before you get anything substantial out to the customer. This doesn't mean that you should never hack stuff in. But in general it's cheaper to pay off the debt quickly instead of paying for the debt.

[lmm]

Ah indeed. As monetary debt becomes more expensive it makes tech debt relatively cheaper - fixing your code in the future is cheaper than fixing it now.