Abstraction isn't free, either. The more you build, the more you're gambling that it abstracts over all future requirements. When you're eventually wrong, some

Abstraction isn't free, either. The more you build, the more you're gambling that it abstracts over all future requirements. When you're eventually wrong, someone must pay the incredibly expensive price of deabstraction. Which can become so untenable that it makes more sense to escape-latch out of it for a new business requirement. If you disagree, then shrink the deadline until you do. What happens with technical debt is that every new/changed feature incurs disproportional costs. And all costs, at the end of the day, boil down into time. Even the best developer has the same finite resource of time as everyone else, and they are stuck choosing between the best of suboptimal solutions once bounded by deadlines. This is why, when encountering a mess of a codebase, it's naive to conclude "wow, what a bunch of amateurs." And that's exactly what I thought at my first job out of university. Eventually I realized that software is just hard and there is never enough time. The more experienced you get, the better you are at writing code that can be changed or thrown away. But you're still only minimizing the bad, not eliminating the bad, so on a long enough time scale with enough monkey wrenches of time constraints and requirement churn, technical debt is inevitable.