Tech Debt Isn’t Evil, But You’d Better Know You Have It
- Dec 10, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 12, 2025
Written by Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, helping startup teams master their tech domain. With 25+ years of leadership in software and digital strategy, he blends enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and AI know-how to guide fast-growing companies.
Founders rarely notice technical debt when it first appears. It arrives quietly, disguised as speed, ambition, urgency, or the simple desire to get something working before the world moves on. Nobody announces its arrival. Nobody marks the moment when a shortcut becomes a fixture. Debt settles into the codebase the way clutter settles into a house, incrementally, invisibly, and with the absolute confidence that it belongs.
The problem is not that teams take shortcuts. The problem is that leaders forget the shortcut was taken.
This is why technical debt hurts. Not because it exists, but because it becomes invisible at the exact moment the organization begins to rely on it.
Early-stage teams love to tell themselves that the messy part is temporary. “We’ll fix this later,” they say, as if “later” will ever be a real slot in the roadmap. They imagine a future where customers are happy, revenue is stable, and investors applaud their discipline. In that calm and well-funded future, they will sit down and rebuild everything “properly.”
The truth is far less cinematic. Once a startup starts to grow, it later disappears. The same shortcuts that helped the team move quickly now form the foundation on which everything else must balance. And because nobody expected the MVP to survive, nobody prepared for what would happen when it did.
Your earlier writing already hinted at this. In our first Brainz article, we warned founders that treating the MVP as disposable is precisely how they end up trapped inside the thing they never planned to keep. That warning wasn’t theoretical. It was a reflection of what countless successful and unsuccessful teams discover when the product is no longer a sketch but a living, active, breakable system that earns revenue and cannot simply be turned off.
The rewrite never comes. Not because teams lack talent or ambition, but because reality intrudes. Users rely on the system. Sales depend on it. Investors expect growth, not archaeology. The product is no longer a prototype. It is a commitment.
This is how a handful of hasty decisions turn into the backbone of a company.
The lie of the tidy rewrite
Ask any founder what they plan to do once traction hits, and they will tell you they want to revisit the early code. They will reassure you that everything built so far is “temporary.” The word “temporary” carries an almost religious weight in startup land, as if speaking it aloud protects you from the long-term consequences of short-term thinking.
Temporary code becomes permanent code for one simple reason, it works just well enough.
Teams underestimate how much courage it takes to stop everything and clean up something that is functioning. They underestimate how fragile growth can be and how hostile stakeholders become when you ask them to pause momentum for the sake of internal repairs. A startup burning through runway is not a place where strategic refactoring wins arguments.
This is why so many companies grow on top of systems they secretly fear. Engineers learn to navigate the fragile sections the way mountaineers learn to navigate unstable snow. They step carefully. They avoid specific paths. They warn new hires to “never touch that file unless you absolutely have to.”
And leadership, often unaware of the rot underneath, wonders why everything takes longer than it should.
What debt actually feels like
Technical debt is not a broken function or a missing test. Debt is the moment when a small change triggers hesitation. It is the silence in the room when someone asks, “How long would it take to modify this flow?” It is the sharp look between senior engineers when they realize nobody fully understands how a particular module works anymore.
Debt is an emotional burden as much as a technical one. It creates fear, the fear that touching the wrong part of the system will cause the entire thing to shudder. It creates hesitation, the loss of that early, reckless confidence that allowed the team to ship daily without worrying about unintended consequences. Eventually, it creates resignation. “It’s just how things are,” teams say, forgetting that complacency is the real enemy of progress.
You can measure the presence of debt by watching how people behave. When new engineers join and spend weeks trying to understand why the code behaves the way it does, the debt has already won. When a minor enhancement turns into a negotiation between developers trying to guess which part of the system is safe to touch, the debt has become cultural. And when leaders complain that delivery is slowing without realizing that they themselves deferred foundational decisions for too long, the debt becomes structural.
At that point, no tool or framework can save you. What is broken is not the code, but the organization’s relationship with reality.
The debt nobody talks about
There is a form of debt more harmful than scrappy code or missing tests, the erosion of organizational memory.
Knowledge debt is the silent, corrosive force behind the most confused, fragile systems. Someone made a decision six months ago, often a perfectly reasonable decision, and failed to document why. Perhaps the team was rushing. Perhaps they believed the decision was obvious. Perhaps the author assumed they would still be around when someone finally asked.
But now that person is gone. Or simply busy. Or working in a different part of the stack. And what was once a logical shortcut becomes an inscrutable artifact.
This is why documentation matters, not as bureaucratic wallpaper, but as a shield against amnesia. When knowledge dissolves, debt accelerates. Most teams do not drown because the code is messy. They drown because nobody remembers where the rocks are.
Why leaders deny debt
If technical debt were only a technical problem, it would be easy to solve. But debt is deeply psychological.
Founders often resist acknowledging it because doing so feels like admitting mistakes. They built the early system. They hired the early engineers. They approved the early shortcuts. From their perspective, the debt represents a critique of their judgment, and critiques are uncomfortable when the company is fragile.
Engineers, on the other hand, sometimes downplay debt because flagging it repeatedly can make them sound unproductive, negative, or resistant to delivery pressure. In many organizations, the person who says “we need to slow down” becomes the person everyone quietly ignores.
Debt thrives in environments where people want to appear strong. It disappears only when people are allowed to be honest.
The company that chases deadlines dies by them
Every company believes it can outrun its debt until the day it can’t. The slowdown is never sudden. It is a gradual suffocation. The roadmap stretches. Releases become risky. Onboarding gets slower. The team starts improvising around the fragility instead of confronting it.
By the time leadership realizes what has happened, the debt is no longer a technical problem, it is a business one. A system that cannot evolve cannot compete.
This article on vendor versus builder makes this point from another angle, teams that try to build everything end up maintaining everything, and maintenance is where debt grows. Yet outsourcing too much creates a different kind of debt, one tied to external roadmaps and constraints. The balance is delicate, and the price of getting it wrong is always paid later, when urgency collides with brittle foundations.
When a company reaches this stage, founders begin fantasizing about the rewrite again. But now the rewrite is no longer an optimistic dream. It is a desperate wish, the longing to step outside the tangled system and start fresh. Unfortunately, desperation is not a strategy, and by this point, a rewrite is often impossible to execute safely. A rewrite is not a moment of clarity. It is a moment of surrender.
Debt as leverage, not liability
Despite how bleak this may sound, technical debt is not a curse. Debt is leverage. It is what allows a small team to do something ambitious before it has the time or resources to do it elegantly. It is what lets a founder learn quickly enough to survive. But leverage only works when you know how much you have. Unmanaged debt behaves like interest accumulating in the dark. Managed debt is a tool.
This is why the teams that scale well are not the ones with the cleanest codebases. They are the ones who treat debt as a conscious decision. They know what they sacrificed and why. They know what must be repaid and what can be tolerated. They use debt to accelerate learning, not as a hiding place for decisions they were too rushed to document. A company that understands its debt owns its future. A company that ignores its debt rents its future from entropy.
The only moment debt becomes dangerous
Debt becomes dangerous not when the code is messy, not when the tests are thin, not even when a critical module has grown so bloated that nobody wants to open it. Debt becomes dangerous the moment leaders stop listening to the people who can see it.
If your engineering team hesitates, pay attention. If they keep patching the same area, pay attention. If they warn that a crucial part of the system cannot support the next stage of growth, pay attention. These signs are not pessimistic. They are the organization’s early detection system.
Once those voices are ignored, once engineers stop raising concerns because nothing ever changes, the company loses its ability to adapt. You can recover from bad code. You do not recover from a culture where truth is inconvenient.
Debt is not the villain, comfort is
If there is a single mistake founders make that will haunt them later, it is believing that success buys them time. Success brings pressure, expectations, customers, partners, and obligations. But it rarely buys you the luxury of slowing down.
If you want to avoid drowning in technical debt, confront it while the company is still small enough to change course. Do it while the system is still flexible. Do it before the shortcuts harden into constraints and the legacy decisions become sacred architecture.
Debt cannot hurt you if you know exactly where it is.
Debt cannot surprise you if you wrote down why you took it on.
Debt cannot embarrass you if you treat it as part of the craft.
Founders who understand this build companies that learn faster than they break. Founders who don’t spend years wondering why every new feature feels like walking uphill in the sand.
Technical debt was never evil. It was only ever a mirror. What you see in it depends on how honest you are prepared to be.
Read more from Alberto Zuin
Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a fractional CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, Master of Your (Tech) Domain. With over 25 years of experience in tech leadership, he helps startups and scaleups align their technology with business strategy. His background spans enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, AI, and agile delivery. Alberto holds an MBA in Technology Management and several top-tier certifications, including CGEIT and CISM. Passionate about mentoring founders, he focuses on helping teams build secure, scalable, and purpose-driven digital products.
