Hundreds of interviews. One question I never skip: “How much technical debt is acceptable?”
Almost nobody answers it well.
Most engineers say “as little as possible.” Most managers say “we try to allocate 20%.” Neither is wrong. But both are missing the real question — because the answer doesn’t live in engineering. It lives in how the business decides what to fund.
Technical debt starts small. It accumulates quietly. By the time it’s painful, it’s everywhere — and the people inside the team have stopped seeing it. I’ve seen it in teams of ten and organisations of thousands. The pattern is the same. The clearest signal is always a new joiner: they notice on day three what the team stopped noticing eighteen months ago.
That blindness isn’t carelessness. It’s adaptation. Teams optimise around the friction they live with daily — and stop registering it as friction at all.
Technical debt is a balance sheet item. We just don’t put it on the balance sheet.
It has carrying costs. Slower releases. Harder onboarding. More incidents. More cognitive load on every engineer, every day. Those costs don’t show up in a dashboard — they show up in attrition, slipped roadmaps, and the features the roadmap quietly stops trying to ship. They compound, and they quietly eat the capacity that should be going to growth.
The reframe that works: put tech debt on the product backlog — like any other item. What does it cost to carry? What does fixing it unlock — in velocity, in reliability, in the features you can now ship? Stack it against the next product item. The answer isn’t always “fix the debt.” Sometimes it’s zero percent. Sometimes it’s one hundred. But it stops being a debate the moment it competes on the same terms as everything else.
This isn’t an engineering conversation. It’s a prioritisation conversation — not a technical hygiene exercise, not a quarterly cleanup, not a side track for engineering to handle alone. It belongs in the same room as product and finance, on the same terms.
Does your leadership team have a shared language for what tech debt is actually costing you?
The ones that do stop arguing about debt and start pricing it.