Bringing that back to tech debt: a simple kind of high-interest short-term debt would be committing code without tests or documentation. Yay, it works, ship it! And truthfully, maybe you should, because the revenue (and customer feedback) you get from shipping fast can outweigh how much more bug-prone you made the code in the short term.

But like all high-interest debt, you should plan to pay it back fast. Tech debt generally manifests as a slowdown in your development velocity (ie. overhead on everything else you do), which means fewer features launched in the medium-long term, which means less revenue and customer feedback.

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Bankruptcy

The tech bankruptcy metaphor is an easy one: if refinancing doesn't work and your tech debt continues to spiral downward, sooner or later your finances will follow. When you run out of money you declare bankruptcy; what's interesting is your tech debt disappears at the same time your financial debt does.

This is a really important point. You can incur all the tech debt in the world, and while your company is still operating, you at least have some chance of someday paying it back. When your company finally dies, you will find yourself off the hook; the tech debt never needs to be repaid.

Okay, for those of us grinding away at code all day, perhaps that sounds perversely refreshing. But it explains lots of corporate behaviour. The more desperate a company gets, the less they care about tech debt.