We all create it. Sometimes for better reasons than others.
It's everywhere, it's costly, and it sucks.
Then I thought about another scary truth that wasn't mentioned in either post:
Much of it never has to be paid back.
That's right, we create "technical debt", but so what?
I often maintain code that's 5 to 10 years old with as many as 100 mods. But just as often, I come across something 10 years old that looks like crap with no mods. How can this be?
Because it works. Somebody wrote a function they needed 10 years ago, and it's apparent today that they didn't know what they were doing. Since then many others have called that function. You want to rewrite it, but you dare not touch it. Why risk production without a request?
It's ugly, it sucks, but it works and has always worked. I bet about half the "technical debt" I've encountered is like this, debt that will probably never be paid back. Then is it really debt at all?