My wife and I are paying off student loans. Obviously we didn't just take on debt because we wanted to. Going into college, she wanted to be a teacher and I wanted to be a software engineer. The only practical way for either of us to get the job that we wanted was for us to get the required degrees. That meant student loans. However, we took them on with the belief that they would be an investment that would pay for themselves in time. And, in this case, they have already started. Now, as quickly as we can, we're paying the loans off. The important parts of this otherwise boring story are as follows: the only reason we took on debt was that is was unavoidable if we were to get to our goal of future jobs, and that at the first available moment we started lowering risk by paying off our debt as quickly as possible.
Boring story aside, for any kind of software project, there will be technical debt. Whether the source of the debt is pressure to finish a project, shifting requirements, or just simply a lack of past experience to draw upon, every project will incur technical debt. Unfortunately, without a billing statement coming at the start of each month, the nagging of engineers can be, and usually is, heard by non-engineers as "engineers just love to rewrite things that already work." The problem is that there are severe consequences for carrying technical debt...
