<story><title>Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt</title><url>https://engineering.squarespace.com/blog/2019/three-kinds-of-good-tech-debt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheLastPass</author><text>One important difference between tech debt and financial debt, is that if the project you accrued a bunch of tech debt in gets killed for unrelated reasons before it&amp;#x27;s completed, your debt is forgiven. You never pay it off, and you never have to.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re validating an idea, don&amp;#x27;t worry about making everything perfect. Worry about validating the idea. Once you&amp;#x27;re more confident that you&amp;#x27;re actually gonna do it long-term, then it starts being more beneficial to pay off the tech debt.</text></item><item><author>davnicwil</author><text>The article links tech debt to financial debt early on, and this is exactly what the analogy is - it is best to be as literal as possible about it.&lt;p&gt;What is good debt? It&amp;#x27;s taking money from someone, promising to pay them back more money in the future, and using the original money to make &lt;i&gt;even more money than that&lt;/i&gt;, so both you and the lender profit.&lt;p&gt;Good tech debt is just the same. It&amp;#x27;s taking shortcuts now to save time and get something shipped, knowing that it will cost you more time than you&amp;#x27;re saving now to fix it later. But by shipping now, you ensure there is a later, with a product that&amp;#x27;s out there and being used, a bigger team and therefore adequate time and then some to fix the debt &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; keep improving the product. Everyone wins.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the theory anyway. I think mostly where it goes awry in the wild is people forgetting the paying it off part. Part of this deal is you have to pay back your lender - they have to win too. It&amp;#x27;s just easily forgotten because &lt;i&gt;you&amp;#x27;re&lt;/i&gt; the lender, so the incentives get a bit conflicted, and you&amp;#x27;ll keep giving yourself more time. But if the lender ultimitely doesn&amp;#x27;t get paid back and loses, you lose, and it&amp;#x27;s a bad debt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cactus2093</author><text>I think what you&amp;#x27;re saying is the more common use of &amp;quot;tech debt&amp;quot;, basically just using it as a synonym for &amp;quot;bad code&amp;quot;. Don&amp;#x27;t worry about code quality, figure it out later.&lt;p&gt;It ignores the stronger debt analogy -- sure, there is a high chance that the idea fails. But if it succeeds and, all else being equal, you have taken on a less tech debt to get there, you will be able to iterate on and grow it more efficiently. So to the extent you&amp;#x27;re taking on debt, it should be an explicit trade-off to increase your chances of proving out the idea. Which is not the same as &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t worry about bad code at all.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;From what I&amp;#x27;ve seen, when it comes to talking about tech debt from an early prototype, it&amp;#x27;s often an excuse&amp;#x2F;euphamism to be considerate to the people that wrote it. The truth is often that it&amp;#x27;s just bad code due to them being inexperienced or lacking the skill or discipline to write better code. Which I don&amp;#x27;t mean as an insult, it seems like there&amp;#x27;s a strong inverse correlation between the kind of person who&amp;#x27;s passionate enough about product over tech, and is creative&amp;#x2F;naive enough to build and validate a brand new product, and the kind of person who understands enough to architect a great system and make the best tech debt trade-offs.</text></comment>
<story><title>Three Kinds of Good Tech Debt</title><url>https://engineering.squarespace.com/blog/2019/three-kinds-of-good-tech-debt</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheLastPass</author><text>One important difference between tech debt and financial debt, is that if the project you accrued a bunch of tech debt in gets killed for unrelated reasons before it&amp;#x27;s completed, your debt is forgiven. You never pay it off, and you never have to.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re validating an idea, don&amp;#x27;t worry about making everything perfect. Worry about validating the idea. Once you&amp;#x27;re more confident that you&amp;#x27;re actually gonna do it long-term, then it starts being more beneficial to pay off the tech debt.</text></item><item><author>davnicwil</author><text>The article links tech debt to financial debt early on, and this is exactly what the analogy is - it is best to be as literal as possible about it.&lt;p&gt;What is good debt? It&amp;#x27;s taking money from someone, promising to pay them back more money in the future, and using the original money to make &lt;i&gt;even more money than that&lt;/i&gt;, so both you and the lender profit.&lt;p&gt;Good tech debt is just the same. It&amp;#x27;s taking shortcuts now to save time and get something shipped, knowing that it will cost you more time than you&amp;#x27;re saving now to fix it later. But by shipping now, you ensure there is a later, with a product that&amp;#x27;s out there and being used, a bigger team and therefore adequate time and then some to fix the debt &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; keep improving the product. Everyone wins.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the theory anyway. I think mostly where it goes awry in the wild is people forgetting the paying it off part. Part of this deal is you have to pay back your lender - they have to win too. It&amp;#x27;s just easily forgotten because &lt;i&gt;you&amp;#x27;re&lt;/i&gt; the lender, so the incentives get a bit conflicted, and you&amp;#x27;ll keep giving yourself more time. But if the lender ultimitely doesn&amp;#x27;t get paid back and loses, you lose, and it&amp;#x27;s a bad debt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caymanjim</author><text>&amp;gt; One important difference between tech debt and financial debt, is that if the project you accrued a bunch of tech debt in gets killed for unrelated reasons before it&amp;#x27;s completed, your debt is forgiven. You never pay it off, and you never have to.&lt;p&gt;This happens with financial debt as well. It&amp;#x27;s the risk that drives interest rates. Financial debt is abandoned (or restructured) when people or companies file for bankruptcy, when homes are foreclosed on, etc. Sure, it might ding your personal credit history in some cases, but financial debt is constantly abandoned at little or no cost to the borrower.</text></comment>