I always thought of technical debt as something that sloppy engineers knowingly or unknowingly assume on behalf of clueless managers. Kind of like a company accountant assuming debt without company officers knowing or caring. I guess I've never had the chance to see competent people make a knowledgable decision to write lousy software.
Really? You've never had a manager tell you do this or it's your job? There are tons of places that do not give a single shit about good software and not even because they don't realize it's going to hurt later.
When a bosses bonus is tied to quarterly results then quality goes out the window every time immediate revenue or cost cutting comes up
But it's not just applicable to lousy software. Even great software is never perfect and making tradeoffs about the design or architecture, or even just the timing of when different components, refactorings, etc. are implemented can be reasonably considered tech debt.
Debt is a liability that you typically need to make payments against; preferably at predictable intervals and of predictable amounts.
Every known (and significant) bug, that isn't fixed, is tech debt. Presumably something has to be done about the effects of the bug and that something has a cost. Fixing the bug then is paying down the associated debt.
