Technical Debt Is a People Problem, Not a Code Problem

According to STX Next's 2023 Global CTO Survey, 91% of CTOs cite technical debt as a top challenge. Yet Protiviti's research shows organizations spend 30% of IT budgets just managing it. I've watched teams blame their codebase for problems that lived in their org chart. Technical debt accumulates because of how people work, not just how they code.

The logic is sound on paper.

The term "technical debt" was coined by Ward Cunningham to describe a deliberate trade-off: shipping faster now for cleanup later. But that's not what I see. What I see is debt nobody chose, nobody planned for, and nobody knows how to repay.

Having built software and advised dozens of companies, I've noticed a pattern: the worst technical debt traces back to organizational dysfunction, not engineering decisions.

Pressure to Ship Creates the Conditions

A survey of technology leaders found "time pressure or deadline" was the most cited cause of technical debt. That's not surprising. What's interesting is this pressure rarely comes from genuine market necessity.

Most of the time, it comes from:

• Arbitrary deadlines - Someone promised a date without understanding the work
• Feature churn - Changing requirements faster than the team can absorb them
• Competing priorities - Multiple stakeholders all claiming their feature is most urgent
• Performance theater - Shipping fast to look productive, even when fast isn't better

When I dig into why a codebase turned into spaghetti, I almost never find engineers who wanted to write bad code. I find engineers given impossible constraints by people who didn't understand consequences.

Technical debt is as much a people problem as a technology problem. Organizations that pile on feature work without recovery time get exactly the codebase they deserve.

Fear of Refactoring Is Fear of Permission

Here's something I've seen repeatedly: engineers who know exactly what needs to be fixed but won't touch it.

It's not incompetence. It's risk management.

Refactoring takes time. That time must be justified. In many organizations, justifying "I made code better but shipped no features" is career suicide. So engineers work around problems instead of fixing them. They copy-paste rather than extract. They leave rot and build on top of it.

A Protiviti survey found 91% of global CTOs named technical debt as one of their biggest challenges. Yet these organizations often don't give engineers permission to address it. The debt is acknowledged but not prioritized.

This fear compounds. Every workaround makes refactoring bigger. Every avoided cleanup makes eventual cleanup scarier. The code doesn't want to be this way. Incentives made it this way. We've written about how technical debt isn't debt - it's rot. Organizational dynamics make that rot spread faster.

Knowledge Silos Create Invisible Landmines

Some of the most dangerous technical debt isn't in the code - it's in the heads of people who left.

Knowledge silos form when:

• One person owns a subsystem - They understand it, nobody else does
• Documentation is treated as optional - "The code is self-documenting"
• Code review is superficial - Approving without understanding
• Onboarding is sink-or-swim - New hires learn by suffering

GitHub found quality documentation increases developer productivity by 50%. Code Climate found knowledge-sharing boosted throughput 70%. Yet most organizations treat documentation as an afterthought and code review as a checkbox.

When the person who understood a system leaves, that knowledge leaves. The remaining team reverse-engineers intent from code never designed to be read by strangers. This is where "we can't touch that code" comes from. Not technical complexity - organizational failure to preserve knowledge.

The Communication Gap Between Tech and Business

Steve McConnell observed "business staff generally has a higher tolerance for technical debt than technical staff." This isn't stupidity. It's communication failure.

Engineers describe problems in terms of code quality, architecture, and maintainability. Business leaders think in features, revenue, and competitive positioning. Different languages.

When an engineer says "we need to refactor the payment system," a business leader hears "we want to spend money on something that won't ship features." When the engineer says "the codebase is fragile," the leader hears "dramatic."

Debt accumulates because those who see it can't explain it to those with budget authority. And budget holders don't have visibility into what shortcuts actually cost.

Many organizations lack a common definition for technical debt or resources to address root causes. Without shared language, the problem stays invisible until crisis.

What Actually Fixes This

If technical debt is a people problem, the fixes have to be organizational, not just technical.

Make cleanup visible and valued. If refactoring is career suicide, engineers won't do it. Create explicit budget for technical improvement. Celebrate engineers who improve the codebase, not just those who ship features. Some companies have "fix it" weeks - but only if leadership protects that time.

Protect against knowledge loss. Documentation isn't overhead. It's insurance. Pair programming and code review should transfer knowledge, not just catch bugs. Rotate ownership so no one is indispensable. The goal: ensure expertise doesn't walk out when someone leaves.

Translate to business terms. "We need to refactor" doesn't work. "Every new feature will take 3x longer and 2x more bugs until we clean up the payment system" does. Engineers must speak velocity, risk, and cost. Business leaders must trust engineers aren't crying wolf. This is one of those architecture decisions that kills companies if ignored.

Change the incentives. If promotion criteria reward shipping fast above all else, you'll get fast shipping and mounting debt. If hiring doesn't account for maintenance, you'll hire people who let old things rot. Incentives shape behavior. Behavior shapes codebases.

The Cost Nobody Calculates

A 2024 Wall Street Journal article noted technical debt costs the US $2.41 trillion annually. Organizations spend 30% of IT budgets managing it. But these numbers hide real costs:

• Developer attrition - Good engineers leave rotting codebases. Those who stay are often those who can't get jobs elsewhere.
• Opportunity cost - Every hour spent fighting technical debt is an hour not spent on valuable work.
• Compounding delays - That 2-day feature takes 2 weeks because of archaeology expeditions through legacy code.
• Morale damage - Nothing saps energy like working on something that fights you at every turn.

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey found technical debt as developers' greatest frustration, with 62% citing it as a problem. Frustration becomes burnout. Burnout becomes turnover. Turnover makes knowledge silos worse. The cycle feeds itself.

This is the shadow side of founder burnout applied to entire engineering organizations. Systemic dysfunction nobody planned but everybody suffers from.

It Starts at the Top

The hardest truth: technical debt is a leadership problem.

Leaders set incentives. Leaders control budget. Leaders decide whether quality is valued or just talked about. Leaders either protect time for maintenance or let it get crushed by feature work.

If your organization has chronic technical debt, look at what leadership actually rewards, not what they say they value. Look at what gets canceled when deadlines slip. Look at how engineers who raise concerns are treated.

The code is a symptom. The organization is the disease.

Technical Debt Source Audit

Check the symptoms you see in your organization. The pattern reveals the root cause.

"The code is a symptom. The organization is the disease."