[vinceguidry]

This isn't necessarily true. I'm the one-man maintainer of the makeup company I work for's Rails site. It's a pretty sweet gig. The marketing team's turnaround doesn't even come close to mine, so I get a lot of downtime from adding new features. They literally can't think of things to implement faster than it takes for me to do them.

There's a lot of technical debt, but I have the time to clean it up. Most of the previous guys in my job just coasted, so I'm already kicking ass compared to them.

[ak39]

That's the thing: technical debt is the cost of innovation.

Edit: "Technical debt has to be the acceptable cost of rapid and affordable innovation."

We can't talk about (technical) debt without recognising the commensurate leverage it provides to business. If a debt does not continue leveraging the business, then and only then, can it be considered carcinogenic. And the only reliable solution then is to simply switch the solution off or replace it.