At my company we also always talk about two kinds of tech debt but in a totally different way: (1) "bad" code debt is basically high interest where the longer y

At my company we also always talk about two kinds of tech debt but in a totally different way: (1) "bad" code debt is basically high interest where the longer you wait the refactor story grows and grows and gets scarier and scarier. (2) "good" is interest free or low interest debt which you should defer paying as long as possible so you can focus on more important immediate things. This is usually achievable when the thing you are ignoring can be neatly encapsulated and doesn't affect the rest of your code as the codebase grows and evolves. Usually we talk about this distinction when deciding to defer work for hypothetical scaling. For example we had an app that required HIPAA compliance and had a chat feature, since we were initially deploying to a few hundred users for a pilot and our main short term goals were about learning/validating we just build it using polling since none of the other sockets based alternatives were easily HIPAA compliant. It worked great for the pilot and took like 2hrs to implement and because it was so simple we were able to evolve the chat experience really quickly with different features as we got feedback.