It's not one-sided though. Debt is often a very useful tool. You take on debt now because you can do more productive things with the money that will be worth more than the payments you have to make on it later. This is an extremely apt description of technical debt. Often times people will make bad decisions about what debt to take on, and the same is true for technical debt, and often times people will overestimate the value they'll get out of the debt, which is again true for technical debt, but debt is still a useful tool, and technical debt is a useful compromise you make to ship software.
Your description is apt when you are talking about an analogy between technical debt and personal debt.
For companies, whether to use debt or equity to finance their balance sheet is just a technical decision. Either way, you have to pay the cost of capital.
(Ie even if you finance your project from equity and not from debt, it still has to be better for your shareholders than just giving them the necessary capital back via a stock buyback.)
A company can have debt as a permanent feature of its balance sheet, just like equity.
Funny enough, I suspect from a corporate finance point of view, technical debt should actually be called 'technical equity', because technical debt only gets expensive when your project takes off. If you never end up using that piece of code, the technical debt never has to be paid. But it gets more and more expensive, the more successful your project is.
Just like selling 50% of your startup to an investor (as equity) gets more and more expensive (in retrospect), only if your startup really takes off. Debt stays the same price, whether your startup is middling or goes to the moon.
I get why Technical Equity is a better term, but very few % age of the population really understand what Equity means, while debt can be explained to a 5 year old
Yes. Though I wouldn't even say it's a 'better term'; just because the metaphor might hold slightly more water in some highly technical sense, doesn't actually make it a better term. ;)
This reminds me: if you went to a farm and actually 'picked the low hanging fruit first', they would likely fire you. The fruit higher up on the tree typically ripens faster, so should be picked first. (But the phrase as a metaphor is fine, and everyone knows what it's supposed to mean.)
