For this reason, I think maintenance load is a bad way to think of tech debt. Time spent not working on features represents design flaws that need to be fixed…b

For this reason, I think maintenance load is a bad way to think of tech debt. Time spent not working on features represents design flaws that need to be fixed…but that’s separate from how I viewed tech debt to mean something. Maybe the article writer is correct that tech debt has become too overloaded a term. But we do need a term that describes not the easily measurable maintenance costs, but the harder to measure “extent to which the code’s state slows down programmers working on it”. That people will abuse this term to describe code they don’t like working on feels inevitable though, that’s just the human condition at work unfortunately.