I think a lot of the time when a developer shouts “technical debt” what they are really shouting is “code someone else wrote that I’d rather rewrite than understand”. (The rest of the time is the same but they’ve understood it enough to think it’s a disaster area.)
I have found it’s best to not take tech debt complaints very seriously and instead look at actual success metrics. For example if every change to a bit of code introduces new bugs then that might be a reason to tidy it up.
I have found it’s best to not take tech debt complaints very seriously and instead look at actual success metrics. For example if every change to a bit of code introduces new bugs then that might be a reason to tidy it up.