A debt has four things
By Natalia Fernández Matienzo ·
A debt has four things: a principal, a rate, a maturity date, and someone on the other side of it.
Those four are why debts get paid. Not discipline. Not good intentions. Structure. On a date somebody wrote down, the person you owe calls, and the thing stops being optional.
Technical debt has none of them.
No principal, because nobody has priced it. No rate —although it is being paid, quietly, somewhere else on the page: as a hiring plan, as a quarter that slipped, as the senior engineer who finally got tired. No maturity date: it comes due on a day nobody can name, which means it comes due never. And no counterparty. Nobody calls.
An obligation nobody can enforce, on no date, to no one, is not a debt. It is a liability nobody has recognised —and in the discipline the word was borrowed from, that is a different thing entirely, and a worse one.
I understand why engineering took the word; it's a good one. Makes the thing sound like it has a schedule. Some teams call it "improvements", which at least drops the pretence that anyone owes anything.
We have our own now. Fifteen years on the other side of the table, and the first thing you learn to look for is the maturity date —so I went looking for ours. There is no date. There was never going to be one.
We wrote a procurement policy once —though "we" is generous to me. Two people I hired did the work: the policy, the workshops, the system it had to run on. I did the rooms. It produced scramble, friction, and very little compliance. What finally made people follow it was us repeating, everywhere, that the CFO had signed it. That is not a policy. That is enforcement by hand —and we were those hands.
What ended it was a system that would not let you pay an invoice without a purchase order. It did not arrive on its own. What was supposed to be a line in the ERP cost a vendor selection, a business case, two hires and a year. Whatever you used to buy in two minutes with a company card now had to be looked at, and, yes, it was slower. The rule stopped being a document and became something you could not route around, and that was the entire difference.
So the interesting number is not how much technical debt you are carrying. Nobody can answer that, and the number would not change anything even if they could. The interesting thing is what, in your system, is ever going to call. If the answer is a person who remembers, you do not have a debt. You have a story you tell about one.