What exactly is “tech debt”?

Defining and quantifying technical debt

Jacob Bennett
The Atomic Engineer
5 min readMay 17, 2024

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Every team I’ve worked with has talked about technical debt. Some teams understood how to manage it. A few were crippled by it. And one company actually failed in large part due to unresolved technical debt.

Sisyphus addressing tech debt

What exactly is technical debt?

Technical debt is a measure of how untidy…

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Staff Software Engineer @ Medium • https://jacob.bio • I write about software engineering, product design and development, and leadership in tech.