A lot of people irrespective of their role at work, be it devs, managers, executives or architects often misunderstand what is to be called as tech debt and end up classifying cruft as tech debt. Management loves the concept of debt, often when it is easily available. The debt metaphor means, management can borrow from the future at cheaper interest rates and repay easily when they are able to multiply their capital acquired through debt. Debt is intentional, needs to be repaid, has to help you achieve more than you will repay in interest.

What people talk about technical debt in the day to day work is not tech debt but cruft. None of that is intentional, it is purely poor practices, bad engineering and accidental. If we want to take an analogy to explain the difference between the two- a family of five people, parents with three kids is having a hatchback.They find it hard to go on their vacation trips and rely on rental vans. Most of the days mixing use of public transport and sharing the car helps them gets through the day. They keep considering about either buying another car or upgrading this one to a larger one but put it aside due to financial constraints. This scenario is what we call as tech debt. What is cruft then? If the same family who has a hatch back, never cleans the car, neither changes oil, does not fix dents and scratches which cause metal rot over time is cruft. Eventually even the small car they have will become unusable.

Tech debt has a benefit, it is always helpful until you hit the next magnitude problem while cruft is always damaging and drain on time and energy. You neither plan nor ask for permission to avoid or clean up cruft. It should be part of your every day job to leave the code in which you live in a clean and well tested state. If you have to keep defending cruft in the name of tech debt, you are in the wrong place.