Debts, Tech and Otherwise

I really hate that framing. "Tech is made up of people who don't do housework" is an insulting and largely incorrect framing, and my vast experience of cleaning my shower has taught me that it's almost completely unlike tech debt. The cost of not doing it is...it looks bad and it's harder to clean next time. And maybe I need to get out the real bleach and the safety gear. This cost is not at all like tech debt, which has downsides that multiply together in unforseen ways and fuse together into critical outages.

Deferred maintenance of other engineered systems is a better metaphor because it includes severe consequences. If you ignore problems in an aircraft, the aircraft doesn't just look slightly gross: it has to crash land in a river, severely injuring 8 people and killing 2. Similarly, the long-running transactions in that batch job you didn't fix + the fact you delete info from other systems within the batch job before the transaction commits + the job retries on an aggressive backoff + you only have a single database with a limited number of available ports, can all multiply together into a significant outage and data loss.