Technical Debt: When to Fix, When to Ship

Every engineering team carries debt. The question is never whether you have it. The question is whether you understand it well enough to make deliberate decisions about it, or whether you are just hoping it does not become a crisis before you get around to dealing with it. Most teams are in the second camp. Not because the engineers do not care, and not because the managers are incompetent, but because technical debt is genuinely hard to reason about. It is invisible to most stakeholders. It com