What "technical debt" means to me.

technical debt.txt

The problem I have with the term technical debt is that 
people retroactively declare it.

It's one thing to have good technical debt – a conscious
decision to put off work (like upgrading your database schema) 
knowing that it would help you now, but believing that you need to 
direct that effort elsewhere. 

It's another thing to have bad technical debt 
(similar to a payday loan) by implementing a stupid
thing or bad hack because you can get it done quickly,
and it bandages over some problem that has to get 
fixed *now*. (Temporal sharding for tweets leaps to
my mind -- at some point tweets came in so fast that 
we couldn't create DB shards quickly enough).

Both of those cases require forward thinking; an 
intentional trade off. 

Most of the time I see the term "technical debt" used it's
shorthand for "we are bad at our jobs and did 
stupid things". You don't get to retroactively 
declare technical debt. If you didn't intentionally 
accrue it (because even walking into the payday 
loan place is done with forethought) you don't 
get to call it technical debt. You just need to 
own building shitty software or having a bad process
and fix it.