Is there a case of an organization ever paying off "tech debt" (I refuse the term, I call it incomplete software)? I've only ever seen it snowball until the product falls into the sea and they start again fresh.

A well-maintained car can drive for a very long time, but for a poorly maintained car, restoring it to like-new condition rarely makes financial sense. It's usually cheaper to just buy a new car, and/or do the bare-minimum maintenance until it dies completely (then buy a new car).

I'm not sure tech debt can ever be fully paid down. You can pay off a bit, and you can stop the debt from accumulating further, but the only way to realistically unburden yourself of a really horrible, big pile of tech debt is to just rebuild the thing from scratch. Or don't, and just keep making money while you wait for the business to fail. (From an investor's perspective, this is the equivalent of riding the car into the ground.)

I loved a quote someone else wrote here some time ago: "Hackers are just tech debt collectors" [1]. If ever there has been a true quote, it is this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29039611

I've never seen it. It's kind of like credit card debt. The people that have it get progressively more to pay off the previous debt until they reach bankruptcy.

So I do think tech debt is accurate, in that the average human deludes themselves into thinking they will pay it off at some point.

You never pay it off. It's like "the war on crime" or "the war on drugs". Don't call it a war if there is no clear win. You can never win the war, but you MUST win the battles in order to not lose it.

I think the term is fine. I don't don't know if is the "ever accumulating" version is correct as at some point it levels off in my experience. At some point things break and you have to take care of it.

It seems like they could at least cordon some of it off into a corral of "legacy products". Or maybe a concept of "next gen" regions that have only a subset of products.