I'm not at all convinced. If incurring a bunch of technical debt makes your company rich, then it was worth it, and it shouldn't really be considered debt.

Do you understand what debt is? Taking out cash loans is essential for many small businesses and startups, and it's worth it, but it's still debt. The bill comes due eventually.

The point isn't that you shouldn't accumulate debt (doing so is impossible in the first place, generally speaking) - it's that you need to be aware about it and make plans to pay it down regularly so it doesn't come due and bankrupt you.

Being worth it doesn't mean it isn't debt, or that it doesn't need to be dealt with.

Your brain has incurred all sorts of technical debt. And yet here we are. Technical debt as is typically bandied about is essentially pseudoscience, like most hard positions on software development. It's something you say to make yourself feel cool and look smart, but it's not evidence-based reasoning.

Huh? Are you actually a developer? Here is a real life example of technical debt holding back a company.

I am working on an app that allows pilots report damage to their aircraft. The app has some technical debt, namely: they built a custom user interface framework in the iOS 3.X era. Yes, it's an old app. They never fixed it and asked me to update it and include a lookup table for several fields.

It takes too much time (est. a week or two), while in modern code, it would be easy for any developer because you could use the standard Interface Builder tool by Apple (est. a day).

That's technical debt. It's real.

You are strictly correct. If you found a company, don't give a shit about technical debt, then sell it to a larger company and leave... you don't have to worry about technical debt.

See: The last startup I left, and the last bosses I had (who were the founders).

For EVERYONE else at the company who actually cares about the product, though... THEY will have to deal with the tech debt. And it will suck.

It absolutely should. And on a very basic level, this is actually risk. Risk equals dollars, and unmanaged risk equals costs.

As a gamble, or we can call it an investment, it can either cost a lot, or pay back, or just exist for a while, perhaps changing state later on. The semantics boil down to luck, or some defined and likely outcome.