Isn't a call option really a call bond, and a bond is an instrument of indebtedness. This article has typos & I fail to understand what they're trying to say,

Isn't a call option really a call bond, and a bond is an instrument of indebtedness. This article has typos & I fail to understand what they're trying to say, specifically this part: > If that code is never called upon again than it would have been foolish to clean it up in the first place. However, lets say a radical new feature is going to added – these quick fixes and become very expensive to deal with. Time has to be taken to fix these issues right before deadline or no one on the team remembers pertinent information need for the code to make sense in the first place Ignoring the fact this is full of grammatical errors & makes no sense, the "call option" metahphor implies I may have to cleanup an entire codebase at some unknown point in time, which isn't true -- its always possible to shoe horn in more quick fixes instead, just like you could pay off a credit card with a cash advanced from another credit card, going further into debt. So Debt is the more appropriate metaphor in my opinion. > The problem with technical debt as a metaphor is that for managers debt can be a good thing But technical debt can be a good thing. And so can a call option, if it never gets called. The article itself points out you may find out later on that you do not even need the code after all, and therefore any cleanup would have been wasted effort. The author is grasping for a metaphor to make technical debt sound more evil than it probably is. No one is going to force you to cleanup your code. You still have the choice of adding more messy code, and going further into debt. Because you have that choice, its just debt, not a call option. Debt, including technical debt, can be a good or a bad thing. Just like real debt, technical debt can be used as a growth hack. If you can write some crappy code that makes you a million dollars, you can go back & pay someone to clean it up later. Its not inherently evil. A call option would be a good metaphor for a security problem. For example an Equifax programmer may have pointed out the leak to his boss, who said let's spend time on new features & instead ignore the security problem [therefore giving out a call option to the public, for short term financial gain]. Then some hacker from the general public came along & called the option, by exploiting the leak. Now Equifax has to pay up. So technical debt is not a call option, security issues are call options. Since writing messy code has been shown to correlated with bugs & security problems, I guess you could actually argue that messy code is a call option because it might get exploited, or crash production... both of which are a loss. Although a liability would be more appropriate metaphor, because you can eliminate liabilities as you gain new information... your product starts becoming more popular over time. A call option cannot be canceled just because of a market uptick. Messy code can be eliminated as your product's market is validated.