Technical Debt

What Is Technical Debt?

Imagine you want to buy an expensive house but you can’t afford the full price upfront. What would you do in that situation?

Most likely, you’d take out a loan, buy the house, and pay it back over time—although you’ll eventually pay more than the original price because of the interest added to the loan.

Naturally, if you delay your payments, you’ll also have to pay late fees on top of the interest.

A similar concept exists in software development. We call it technical debt: when a developer chooses a quick and easy solution instead of taking the time to implement the best and most robust approach. By doing so, they implicitly commit to revisiting that part of the code later and replacing the temporary fix with a proper solution.

Just like loan late fees, technical debt “accumulates interest” over time. The longer you postpone addressing it, the more it slows you down—until even the smallest changes take hours of effort.