[jmaistre]

One of the most valuable startup skills is to know which kind of debt has a low interest rate and which kind of technical debt has a high interest rate. Certain things - lack of tests, poor build system, poor deploy system, very poorly structured code - have a very high interest rate. Every time you create bugs, you waste time tracking it down and fixing it. Every time you check something in that breaks the dev environment for the rest of the team, you create bugs. On the other hand, messy code that is isolated to one system, or an architecture that has a bit of copy and paste, are usually not too big of a deal. Going on some deep dive to create some "generalized framework solution" is almost always an error.

[hinkley]

Some people talk about Reversible Decisions, and I think what you're saying plays into that sentiment.

Unfortunately some people don't realize that in many situations not making a decision is itself a decision, and so they don't always notice it when it happens. That can be anything from the ones you mentioned, like testing and tools, to authentication, auditing, localization, robust error handling, resource/memory leaks, or monolithic designs that prevent scaling.