I think one of the problems with tech debt as a metaphor is that generally with financial debt the person or entity who can reap the benefit or suffer the conse

I think one of the problems with tech debt as a metaphor is that generally with financial debt the person or entity who can reap the benefit or suffer the consequences of that debt are one and the same, and they are making a decision with both of those scenarios in mind. The CFO is the sole person "doing the math" on accruing debt. The person who get to live in the house is the one taking on mortgage debt. In tech debt though, that is split into two groups: - "the business" concretely reap the benefit of accruing tech debt (release faster = more profit), only abstractly feeling the consequences (developers are maybe slower and maybe more miserable than they should be) - developers suffer the consequences directly (working with badly maintained code that you don't have leeway to resolve is soul crushing), while only abstractly reaping any benefit[1] (maybe the business profits more which maybe gives them more leeway for maybe a better pay rise than they would have otherwise gotten) The concrete feelings are obvious, the abstract ones are all arguable because you don't live the opposite (maybe this feature would have always taken this long, maybe the company would have always been able to afford that pay rise), and so are easy to ignore. So then, unlike financial debt, the decision whether or not to accrue tech debt is ugly tension between two groups who don't really understand or have empathy for each others motivation. The business would always prefer you go as fast as you can, and developers would always prefer they work with code that isn't miserable to work with. Attempts to solve this are pretty mixed in my experience, and generally the business wins. Which is I think, where most people's negative feelings on the phrase "tech debt" comes from. [1] the obvious counterpoint here is startups and other jobs where you get stock options etc. I have only worked in that scenario once, and my company was a subsidiary of a much larger one, so our ability to move the needle on stock value was pretty negligible. It may be in scenarios where you really can make a difference tech debt decisions are more harmonious. Interested to hear people's experiences.