That's an improvement on the article's classification. I'd say it's "make the change now; clean up later" engineers vs "clean up now so the change is easy later

That's an improvement on the article's classification. I'd say it's "make the change now; clean up later" engineers vs "clean up now so the change is easy later" engineers. Too much of the former and productivity grinds to a halt under all the tech debt. Too much of the latter and there'll be zero new features shipped. A balance (ideally within each engineer) is ideal.