Confession: As a developer I've personally fallen for all three of those misconceptions, and I will probably keep falling for them. I'm also pretty bad at actu

Confession: As a developer I've personally fallen for all three of those misconceptions, and I will probably keep falling for them. I'm also pretty bad at actually knowing when I'm running the "technical debt credit card" or even checking what's left in the balance to pay off. Sometimes when I'm trying to pay down the balance, I end up adding a lot more to it. What I understand well enough, I then have a hard time communicating effectively. I'm a pretty bad influence, so when I end up spending a lot of time working with any other developers I eventually catch them doing the same thing. Some more than others. What's worse is that we are the only ones who could possibly know anything about the technical debt that we understand so fuzzily. All that management can hope to get is a secondhand account of all this, so I tend to award mine only partial blame for being pretty consistently terrible at making technical debt decisions.