Is 'Technical Debt' a concept outside of the IT profession?

Question

Technical Debt is a well-known concept used a lot within the practice of software development.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debtFrankly, I'm a bit skeptical about this concept, especially because it does sound reasonable, but why isn't it a thing outside of IT?How do architects of infrastructure, buildings or vessels deal with this? Do they use such concepts?How do medical professionals deal with this, is it a thing for them?I feel that Technical Debt is a term that often obfuscates what is really going on instead of clarifying it.

onion2k · Accepted Answer

I think technical debt requires the concept of 'updates' in order to be applicable to an industry. If you ship something without a mechanism to change it later (eg a building or a ship) you can't really have 'technical debt', because there's no mechanism to pay the debt off. You have to fix the problems before you ship else they'll be in the product forever. In software we have the advantage that we can update things later so we can ship even knowing there are problems in the product and still pay the debt off.

082349872349872 · Answer

In politics, a "reactionary" is someone who defends technical debt, that is, practices which may have once been pragmatic but no longer are. A "progressive" is someone who proposes a from-scratch rewrite, replacing the technical debt with something which breaks users' old workarounds by being buggy in new and unexpected ways.