Tech debt is weird

Jesse wrote this interesting article on technical debt, which resonated with me spiritually but not directionally -- which is a very weird way to say that I agree with some parts and disagree with others (so you should read this not as a critique of the post but an exploration from my point of view). The title of this essay is "negative-interest tech debt", which gives you a sense of where Jesse is going, but read the post in its entirety for two reasons: it is short, it is nuanced; he is clearly neither arguing that technical debt is a thing of the past and we should treat it as such, nor that it's the exact same as it's always been. With that in mind, I have three commingled takes. Technical debt is materialized as drag against the ability to deliver customer value. This sounds like a pedantic recharacterization of Jesse's words, but I want to be very deliberate about this because I think the distinction is meaningful. In particular, it is important to remember that there are times…