Broadly speaking, the cost of making a tech-related decision that makes things easier now but harder in the future.
Personal take: tech debt isn't "bad code" any more than a hotdog is a bad meal when you're working with what you have. Sure steak is better, but we can't always have steak. People ascribe more/deeper meaning to the phrase than necessary and get tangled up in the metaphor far beyond practicality.
I agree 100% that tech debt isn't bad code, and was never meant to suggest it. But that train left the station long ago, and now even experienced programmers call bad code tech debt. The term now has no fixed or shared meaning, especially not among people who aren't programmers. To my mind, continuing to use it, despite having long ago lost most power to convey a specific idea, is wasteful. Worse, because it has no fixed meaning, it can be and is used to mean almost anything that, as the article notes, "feels bad".
Perhaps it's a matter of my own personal experiences, where "tech debt" was applied to all kinds of things. If the business leadership determined some work to be tech debt, programmers were penalized for spending more than 10% of their time on it. In accounting terms, the business equated "tech debt" with operating expenses, and the business was rabid about reducing OpEx in their programming/IT department.
4 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] threadPersonal take: tech debt isn't "bad code" any more than a hotdog is a bad meal when you're working with what you have. Sure steak is better, but we can't always have steak. People ascribe more/deeper meaning to the phrase than necessary and get tangled up in the metaphor far beyond practicality.
Perhaps it's a matter of my own personal experiences, where "tech debt" was applied to all kinds of things. If the business leadership determined some work to be tech debt, programmers were penalized for spending more than 10% of their time on it. In accounting terms, the business equated "tech debt" with operating expenses, and the business was rabid about reducing OpEx in their programming/IT department.