Unpopular opinion, probably here, but definitely among people I've shared this with before: The phrase technical debt is a red flag itself and probably should never be used.
Most people seem to get that the issue of technical debt is really a business issue about tradeoffs. So, if the person who is concerned about technical debt is senior enough they will have some ability to see the business tradeoff and thus can completely avoid the phrase. They'd say instead something like "I was thinking that if we changed X we would get value Y."
A person who uses the phrase Technical Debt is signaling that they aren't capable of saying something that direct.
That's one issue.
And then the other issue is that a huge amount of technical debt is just code that a more senior engineer would refactor as they went. It's a junior engineer who says, "this is a huge mess and I need a full stop of my contributions to the business so that I can focus on untangling it."
But the problem with junior engineers doing refactoring/rewriting is that they end up creating a different mess of code and bugs.
Am I right 100% of the time about this? No. But I'd love to raise for engineers here that although the phrase technical debt caries a lot of emotional weight, it also brings a lot of baggage from all the times management has heard the phrase from someone that didn't understand the bigger picture. With a little bit of work you could understand the business implications and then end up completely avoiding the use of the phrase.
Most people seem to get that the issue of technical debt is really a business issue about tradeoffs. So, if the person who is concerned about technical debt is senior enough they will have some ability to see the business tradeoff and thus can completely avoid the phrase. They'd say instead something like "I was thinking that if we changed X we would get value Y."
A person who uses the phrase Technical Debt is signaling that they aren't capable of saying something that direct.
That's one issue.
And then the other issue is that a huge amount of technical debt is just code that a more senior engineer would refactor as they went. It's a junior engineer who says, "this is a huge mess and I need a full stop of my contributions to the business so that I can focus on untangling it."
But the problem with junior engineers doing refactoring/rewriting is that they end up creating a different mess of code and bugs.
Am I right 100% of the time about this? No. But I'd love to raise for engineers here that although the phrase technical debt caries a lot of emotional weight, it also brings a lot of baggage from all the times management has heard the phrase from someone that didn't understand the bigger picture. With a little bit of work you could understand the business implications and then end up completely avoiding the use of the phrase.