I don’t believe we can equate jonesing for a fresh hit to writing well intentioned but ultimately difficult code or the product of inexperience.

Besides which, it trivialises the seriousness and the tragedy of addiction. If you think your tech debt is similar to that you are well equipped to quit your job and work elsewhere. An addict does not have such an easy choice, they can’t leave their addiction to someone else and move on.

You choose to take the payday loan or hit up a shark, addiction or no.

The point where I concur is when you gamble the short term against the future despite all evidence that you will benefit from spending time to save time.

all analogies and metaphors are in some ways inexact - indeed the whole concept of technical debt as a thing correlating to real debt is fraught with edge cases that don't exactly line up. Nonetheless if the metaphor has some utility then individual expressions of it such as mine will often have some utility - hence your concurring on a single point while finding other implications problematic.

The victim in that metaphor is not an individual coder who can go work elsewhere, it is the org who takes on technical debt and sometimes can't function at all without the code in question.

>I don’t believe we can equate jonesing for a fresh hit to writing well intentioned but ultimately difficult code or the product of inexperience.

Agreed. The addict might recover. Organizations with poor culture are doomed.

> I don’t believe we can equate jonesing for a fresh hit to writing well intentioned but ultimately difficult code or the product of inexperience.

That's not what "technical dept" is. Choosing a quick solution instead of a proper one that would take more effort is. I've made that conscious more than once myself: to hit a deadline, or because I didn't know if the MVP would even survive long enough to worry about code maintenance.