A well-maintained car can drive for a very long time, but for a poorly maintained car, restoring it to like-new condition rarely makes financial sense. It's usu

A well-maintained car can drive for a very long time, but for a poorly maintained car, restoring it to like-new condition rarely makes financial sense. It's usually cheaper to just buy a new car, and/or do the bare-minimum maintenance until it dies completely (then buy a new car). I'm not sure tech debt can ever be fully paid down. You can pay off a bit, and you can stop the debt from accumulating further, but the only way to realistically unburden yourself of a really horrible, big pile of tech debt is to just rebuild the thing from scratch. Or don't, and just keep making money while you wait for the business to fail. (From an investor's perspective, this is the equivalent of riding the car into the ground.)