George, thanks for your input.

I don’t think that you should reduce technical debt at any cost though.

StackOverflow is a classic example of this. When they started out, they prioritized scaling to millions of users over everything else. So they forgot about unit testing to a large extent, because it would have slowed things down and stunted the site’s growth.

They do more testing now, but taking on the debt initially was crucial for their growth.

It’s akin to a business getting a bank loan to have more financial leverage in the short term. They’ll have to pay their debt and interest back of course. But without that debt they might not have been able to start.

I hope this clarified my thoughts!