Indeed, technical debt can be there for whatever reason. It could be that idiot coder who caused a lot of damage in the code before someone finally checked wha

Indeed, technical debt can be there for whatever reason. It could be that idiot coder who caused a lot of damage in the code before someone finally checked what he did. It could concern old code created by otherwise sensible programmers at a time when it just wasn't clear how something should work. It could be a matter of something that was once a good pattern, but by the introduction of something newer has become technical debt (although you mostly would call this just "old code"). And indeed, sometimes you have to hack something in because there's this customer of manager who DEMANDS that something happens NOW. In general technical debt is basically bad code that when left unfixed will do more damage over time and will often end up costing you more than the times it takes to just fix it.