When I suggested this article topic to my engineering partners here, they bristled. Good. That tension is exactly why we need to have this conversation. They were concerned that I was pushing back on the need for technical investment work. I wasn't. I was pushing back on the lack of precision in how we talk about it. And that distinction matters. The Problem with "Tech Debt" A few years ago I was helping a team that was battling incident after incident. Each outage expanded t