There are many types of technical debt. It's something that accumulates organically in any real world project, because the real world doesn't care if your code is a paragon of programming excellence or not. It's expected, and simply part of the process, to develop technical indebtedness. The important part is controlling that indebtedness so that it doesn't cause major disruptions -- this usually means periodically cleaning up old debts and ensuring you have a robust system of monitors and failsafes. In a niche like finance, you certainly have to be more aggressive to ensure that no serious breakages or irrevocable indebtedness make their way into critical transaction code.
It's something that accumulates organically in any real world project, because the real world doesn't care if your code is a paragon of programming excellence or not.
Which is short-sighted, really. Technical debt has somewhat the same properties as financial debt, which is why public companies have to disclose monetary debt and have plans for dealing with it. It's high time that the culture caught up to technical reality and started to treat technical debt in the same way. This is especially true for finance!
In a way you are basically saying the same thing, but the warning sign to note is your observation that "the real world doesn't care." It would be insane for the real world to not care about a company's financials, particularly its debt. It's just as insane with technical debt.
Yes, I agree to an extent. I guess the problem is that quantification of technical debt is not so straightforward as financial debt.
When I say the "real world doesn't care", I don't necessarily mean that as a bad thing. The realities of shipping a product urge companies to make compromises. Like financial debt, technical debt is a useful tool, as long as it's used responsibly and kept under control.
Yes, but when the real world doesn't care so much about financial debt, things start failing. Witness 2008. This happens with tech debt too, it's just not well understood by the mainstream. I'm pretty sure when Alamo got acquired, it was in part due to their crappy software making them less convenient to visit and uncompetitive. I think it was them. I remember years ago one car rental company's agent terminals were so bad it just took twice as long to get through their line.
And there's nothing wrong with technical debt in and of itself. Just like financial debt it's a tool of leverage and time-shifting costs. However, just like financial debt, it can bite you, so it's generally a good policy for companies to be open about what debts they have and their plans for dealing with it.
Relevant to the discussion, a level of debt for one company may not be appropriate for another kind of company, and this is especially true of financial companies.
This is not a dig at Coinbase. I'm just suggesting that endorsing technical debt in the finance sector may not be smart.