Sorry, I meant "if there are sufficiently stroppy senior developers who can knock some sense into the other developers, it is almost never the programmers who d

Sorry, I meant "if there are sufficiently stroppy senior developers who can knock some sense into the other developers, it is almost never the programmers who decide to incur technical debt". But, sadly, even that isn't true. It really comes down to the complexifers vs the simplifiers. The complexifers generate technical debt simply by existing. They can't not generate technical debt, because they love complexity and create it to the full extent that they are capable. Thus getting rapidly out of their depth† and hence the tar pit analogy. NB: architects are usually, but not always complexifers. †since there is that old saw about debugging being twice as hard as writing the code, therefore if you write code to your limits you by definition aren't smart enough to debug it.