technical debt will not always manifest itself as instability/bad product. It might just affect development time of things interacting with the bad, old code -

technical debt will not always manifest itself as instability/bad product. It might just affect development time of things interacting with the bad, old code - or make bugs harder to fix Changes to old nasty code will probably be hacky under the mentality "we're going to refactor this anyways, no point in writing clean code /now/" Most old code (i've worked with) will function fine - it has for a while after all.