"I don't know the programming language, so it's tech debt."

This was a justification once given to me about why we needed to rewrite a service.

It was then I knew "tech debt" as a phrase had lost all meaning.

You might argue, "they're using it wrong."

Sure, maybe. But they also had likely heard it used in the sense that, "anything that makes me less productive." And they took it in the strictest sense of that phrase.

That is, with emphasis, "anything that makes 𝗺𝗲 less productive."

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