Clark Kampfe

I'm tired of hearing people use "tech debt" as a catch-all term for bad code.

Not that "tech debt" is a useless term. It is applicable in certain narrow circumstances. It's useful to describe the intentional construction of partial solutions to achieve a higher-level goal faster. This can be valuable to clarify future costs to stakeholders.

But hardly anyone uses it that way.

What you hear instead is a kind of euphemism. People will say "this project has a lot of tech debt that we need to clean up" and everyone will nod along sagely, when what they really meant but couldn't say publicly was "this codebase is shit".

Sometimes, code really is just bad code, not tech debt. It's just shit.