[ktrnka]

> What is tech debt, really?

It's gotta meet two criteria for me: 1) code that's unusually hard to maintain or extend that 2) could've been designed much better initially. So "uses a weird library" wouldn't necessarily qualify unless it's very cumbersome. "Uses a weird language" qualifies if there aren't many employees that know the language. If it's a situation in which the code could be better, but the current needs of the code were not knowable at the time of authoring, I wouldn't call that tech debt.

I don't like to talk about "good code" or "bad code". It's rarely grounded in evidence, and more often a sneaky way to say "it makes sense to me personally". Maintenance cost isn't easy to quantify but it's a step in the right direction.

> Is the phrase tech debt being misappropriated to justify rewrites?

This seems to focus on the terminology aspect more than the underlying problem -- many engineers are just more enthusiastic about new code, and some will make up whatever argument they need to spend their time on new code rather than old. So if it weren't a misuse of terminology, it'd be a misuse of something else.

I'd suggest asking people to quantify it at least a little -- could someone estimate project completion with/without a refactor to get a general sense? When I've asked my people to do that it helps us talk about whether it's worth X months to save Y% * Z features.