If finance cannot price it, engineering cannot pay it down.
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Technical debt is the engineering word for a class of cost that finance does not have a category for. The work is real. The cost compounds. The metaphor reaches for credit because credit is the closest concept the org understands.
Until technical debt shows up on a balance sheet adjacent to actual debt, it will be deprioritised by anyone whose bonus depends on the actual numbers. The fix is mostly translation, not engineering.
Learn to price the debt. The team that can put a dollar on the workaround is the team that gets time to fix it.
