[Bahamut]

I've seen technical debt accrued without regard at a company once - just before leaving, they had to scrap their whole prior frontend web app and rewrite it from scratch, about a year after they started.

Avoid technical debt at all costs - spending the extra effort on good engineering is worth avoiding an awful situation. Managers of course bear the most responsibility, but developers can do their part too many times.

[syllogism]

But think about what you just wrote! "Avoid technical debt at all costs" --- of course you don't mean that literally.

What you mean is "avoid technical debt at a price at which paying down the debt is good value", which is...totally banal.

Technical debt is half of a complicated trade-off. You can't say anything more useful than "make good trade-offs" in the abstract...Which is why I hated this article, and others like it.

[Bahamut]

Well, "at all costs" is used as a colloquy to mean "as much as possible". Sometimes it isn't possible of course, but managers and developers owe it to themselves to make better decisions many times.

I think the worst offender I see is in developers when it comes to this - many tend to cut time and be afraid of exploring something new.

[tcopeland]

> they had to scrap their whole prior frontend web app and rewrite it from scratch

How do people decide to do rewrites rather than incrementally improve an existing app? Unless there's a language change involved, I would almost always go with the incremental refactor... as long as someone's committed to actually doing the work.