Let’s talk about tech debt.

That magical phrase that makes your engineers become prophets that warn about an impending doom that nobody believes until it’s too late, all while your Team Lead develops a sudden fascination with the ceiling tiles and your CEO gets a mysterious urgent call from “a very important investor.”

Here’s what actually matters: Tech debt is real, it has consequences, and it’s also wildly over-dramatized about 60% of the time. In the other 40% it’s probably under-dramatized until a customer gets a bug or production crashes.

So welcome to the wonderful world of technical debt, where everyone is wrong, everyone is right, and the only consensus is that this conversation should have happened three sprints ago.

What Even IS Tech Debt? (Besides a Convenient Excuse)

More formally, it’s the implied cost of rework caused by choosing an easy, limited, or quick solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer.
The thing is that not all tech debt is created equal, and this is where things get tricky.

You’ve got a bunch of debt types:

Quick-and-Dirty Debt: You knowingly took a shortcut because the trade-off made sense. You needed to get this out to production ASAP. You wrote // TODO: refactor this abomination and moved on. Nice job.

Ignorance Debt: You didn’t know better at the time. Junior dev, new tech stack, it was 2015 and you thought Angular 1 would last forever. We’ve all been there. No judgment. (except a little judgment.)

Code Rot: The code was fine when you wrote it. Then the world changed. New versions, new patterns, new security vulnerabilities. Your perfectly reasonable 2019 React components now look like hieroglyphics to the new junior devs.

Actual Garbage: Someone just… didn’t care. Copy-pasted from ChatGPT without reading. Nested ternaries seven levels deep. Variable names like obj. This is the tech debt equivalent of leaving dirty dishes in the sink for three weeks.

The Great Tech Debt Misconception: Everything is NOT on Fire

I know, I know. That React component with 47 useEffect hooks and 3,000 lines of code is “blocking the team’s velocity.” That core service with 50% test coverage is “a ticking time bomb.”

But is it though?

The startup reality check: If it’s working and customers are paying, it’s probably fine for now.

Yes, some of the code makes you cry.
Yes, onboarding takes three extra days of confused questions and long sighs.
Yes, there’s that one file everyone’s too scared to touch.

But you know what’s worse than tech debt?
Running out of runway because you spent six months “doing it right” instead of closing deals.

Your beautifully architected, perfectly tested codebase means absolutely nothing if you’re shutting down because you missed product-market fit while refactoring.

When Tech Debt Actually Matters

Level 1 - Annoying but Harmless:
Inconsistent code style, missing comments, that one file everyone reformats differently. Does it spark joy? No. Is it killing your business? Also no. Fix it when you’re bored, or don’t.

Level 2 - Slowing You Down:
Deployment takes 45 minutes because nobody’s bothered to optimize the Docker build. Tests fail randomly and everyone just reruns CI. Local dev setup requires following a 47-step Google Doc that’s six months out of date. You’re burning 5-10 hours per week on friction that shouldn’t exist. This is costing you actual money in developer productivity. Worth addressing between features.

Level 3 - Actively Hurting:
A “simple” feature request turns into a three-day archaeological dig through coupled services. The same bug keeps resurfacing because the root cause is architectural. Your newest engineer just asked “why does every PR touch 15 files?” and you had to look away. You’re now paying the interest on your debt, and it hurts. Time to schedule serious refactoring.

Level 4 - Business Risk:
Security vulnerabilities that keep you up at night. Your app crashes when traffic spikes above baseline. That OAuth integration breaks every other week and customers are complaining. Your best engineer just said “I can’t ship anything in this codebase” and started updating their LinkedIn.
This is where companies die. Not dramatically, just… slowly. Customers leave. Engineers quit. Investors lose confidence. You’re stuck choosing between shipping broken features or shipping nothing at all.
This is actually critical. Drop everything.

What Happens When You Ignore It Too Long

Stage 1: The Slowdown
Simple changes start taking days instead of hours.
Your best engineer spends a week adding a button.
New hires look at the codebase and quietly start interviewing elsewhere.
You’re not shipping fast anymore, but you tell yourself it’s just a rough patch.

Stage 2: The Breakdown
Features ship with bugs. Bugs resurface after being “fixed.” Your on-call rotation becomes a nightmare.
Customer support is escalating issues faster than engineering can triage them.
You start losing deals because prospects ask for features you technically have, but they’re so broken you can’t demo them.

Stage 3: The Rewrite
Someone finally says it: “We need to rebuild this from scratch.”
You freeze feature development for three months. Revenue growth stalls. Your VP of Engineering quits. The board starts asking uncomfortable questions.
Half your customers churn because you stopped shipping.

I’ve seen companies burn through a good chunk of runway on a rewrite that could’ve been avoided with two weeks of refactoring six months earlier.

The problem isn’t that they had tech debt.
Every codebase has tech debt.
The problem is they ignored the signals until the interest rate became unsustainable.

This is what I mean when I say most tech debt isn’t an emergency until suddenly it absolutely is.
And by then, you’ve usually missed your window to fix it cheaply.

The Startup Paradox: You Can’t Afford It, But You Can’t NOT Afford It

Confused? Welcome to startup life. Wait until you try to explain this to your board.

There’s this common trap where you say “We’ll clean it up after we raise our Series A / hit 10K users / launch the next feature / achieve world peace.”
If you’ve ever said this kind of sentence, don’t feel bad, just know that you’re a very delusional person.

The only practical way to consistently reduce your debts, is to weave it into your regular workflow.
Because that “tech debt sprint” that will happen when you have “time” will never happen.
Stop fantasizing about a magical two-week period where you’ll have no feature work, and you can “clean things up.”

And it’s not because people don’t care (although sometimes they don’t).
And it’s not because other devs are lazy (although sometimes they are).
And it’s not because some managers will consider that piece of shit code “good enough” (although sometimes they will).

It’s because that’s how it always is, no matter where you work, how many devs you’ve got on hand, or how stressed the current sprint is.
There’s always something more important coming down the pipeline, and the rare occasions where that’s not the case are just not enough to deal with all that debt.

But it can be done.
All it takes is a passion for code quality, an ability to block out all the annoying indifference from people above you, and some… questionable approaches to deal with that debt.

Approach #1: The Stealth Refactor

The nice thing here is that you’re creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
Clean code is easier to work with, which means you’re more likely to keep it clean.
Messy code makes you rush to get out of there as fast as possible, which makes it messier.
You’re choosing which cycle you want to be in.

Three months from now, the parts of your codebase that actually matter, the ones you touch regularly, will be in decent shape.
The parts that don’t matter? Still a dumpster fire, but who cares? They’re not slowing you down.
You’ve optimized for reality, not for some fantasy world where you have time to clean up code nobody uses.

Approach #2: Choose Your Battles

If you’re planning to rebuild a feature in six months anyway, who cares if the current implementation is held together with duct tape and prayer?
Let it be ugly. Let it offend you. It’s temporary. Embrace the chaos.

This is particularly true for MVP features. If it works and customers are validating it, great!
When you rebuild it properly later, you’ll have real usage data to inform your decisions.
Your beautiful, perfectly architected v1 that nobody used would have been wasted effort anyway.

The catch: This only works if you actually have a plan and timeline to rebuild it. If “we’ll fix it later” has no date attached, you’re not making a strategic choice, you’re just procrastinating. And that temporary hack? It’s going to be there in three years, making everyone miserable.

I’ve seen too many “temporary” solutions become permanent infrastructure. Set a reminder. Actually schedule the refactor. Or accept that you’re choosing to live with this forever.

Approach #3: The “Future Me” Test

Before shipping something questionable, ask yourself: “Will Future Me understand why I did this?” You could always replace “Future Me” with “the next poor bastard who has to work on this code in six months,” but I find it more motivating to think about my own future suffering.

If the answer is yes, document it and move on. A comment explaining “This is intentionally hacky because X constraint” is worth more than you realize.
It transforms that “WTF” into a “WTF, Oh… okay, I get it”.

If the answer is no, maybe take 30 more minutes to make it less terrible.
Future Me deserves better.

Approach #4: The Art of Communicating Tech Debt

When engineers say: “We need to refactor the authentication system.”
Business hears: “We’d like to spend three weeks rebuilding something that already works while competitors ship features.”

When business says: “Just ship it, we’ll fix it later.”
Engineers hear: “Compromise everything you believe in and create a monster you’ll maintain forever.”

Neither translation is accurate. Neither is completely wrong either.

Here’s how to bridge the gap:

Instead of: “We have critical tech debt in our API layer.”
Try: “Our API response times increased 300% over six months. It’s adding 2 seconds to every user action, and we’re seeing 15% drop-off in our conversion funnel. We can fix the worst offenders in a week.”

Instead of: “Just ship it, we’ll fix it later.”
Try: “Let’s ship the MVP with the simple solution now and validate it with users. If it sticks, we’ll schedule two sprints next quarter to rebuild it properly with what we learned.”

Instead of: “This needs a complete rewrite.”
Try: “We can refactor the three most painful components, the ones causing 80% of our bugs, in one week. The full rewrite would take two months and the ROI isn’t there yet.”

Speak in impact. Speak in costs. Speak in trade-offs.
Nobody cares that your code is “elegant” or “following best practices.”
They care that it works, ships fast, and doesn’t wake them up at 3 AM.

The Hard Truth

Wait, don’t close the tab. Hear me out.

The teams that ship fastest aren’t the ones with the most elegant architecture, they’re the ones comfortable with “good enough for now.”
They’re the ones who can look at a problem, build the simplest thing that works, ship it, and move on.
While their competitors are debating microservices versus monoliths, they’re already in production learning what customers actually want.

But, and this is critical, they’re also the ones who know which shortcuts will kill them.

They skip unit tests on the throwaway prototype, but they obsess over auth security.
They ship hacky UI code, but they architect their data layer properly because migrations are hell.
They write TODO comments, but they actually come back to the critical ones.

It’s not about choosing between “move fast” and “do it right.” It’s about moving fast on the things that don’t matter and doing it right on the things that do.

The goal isn’t zero tech debt. The goal is sustainable tech debt.
Debt you can live with. Debt that doesn’t compound into system-wide failure. Debt that you pay down before it starts costing you engineers, customers, or your sanity.

The difference between a smart shortcut and a fatal one is usually about six months and a few honest conversations you didn’t have.

Conclusion

But there’s a difference between imperfect and unmaintainable.
Between “this could be better” and “this is actively costing us deals.”
Between strategic shortcuts and the slow rot that kills startups from the inside out.

And that’s okay.

Great software isn’t written, it’s rewritten. And rewritten again. And then refactored. And then eventually replaced.
It’s a living thing that grows, evolves, and occasionally develops concerning symptoms that require intervention.

Your job isn’t to prevent all tech debt. It’s to make conscious decisions about what debt you’re taking on, why you’re taking it on, and when (if ever) you’re going to pay it back.
To know the difference between strategic shortcuts and reckless negligence. To pay attention to the debt interest accumulating in the background before it bankrupts you.

So go forth, ship that questionable code, add that TODO comment, and push to production. Just… maybe leave a few breadcrumbs for Future You. They’re going to need them.

And when Future You opens that file and sees the horrors within, they’ll understand.
Because Past You left a comment explaining the madness. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll smile, add their own hack on top of yours, and kick the can down the road to Even-More-Future You.

It’s the circle of life, startup edition.

Your tech debt isn’t going anywhere. It’s just sitting there, patiently, waiting for the absolute worst possible moment to introduce itself to your on-call engineer.