Technical debt is a very bad thing for software development. As time passes, the more debt you collect and the worse things get. Before you realize it, you have accrued tons of interest. Your whole life starts getting bogged down. You find yourself in an impossible situation, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into the pool of quicksand. Your nose is barely above the surface, and you are taking your last desperate gasps of air. This is often a very cruel disease that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. A good example is trying to maintain legacy code. Or pushing new functionality atop a product that is not yet ripe for change. Focusing too deeply at the details in bug-fixing mode and not spending enough time looking at the whole picture will eventually cause much havoc and suffering.

More often than not, this is caused by doing too much too quickly and having to cut corners in order to achieve impossible deadlines. If you prefer it, you can just keep on sweeping the leftover dirt and dust under the carpet, as if nothing is happening. Sooner or later small bumps will appear and grow larger until they become impossible to hide. You reach a point in time when you cannot keep on ignoring these bumps. Even if everyone else seems to be ignoring them. Human nature blinds us when the so-called more important short-term goals are threatening our comfort zone, and we sacrifice the more important long-term survival for quick satisfaction. Our chances of surviving from one day to the next decrease pretty drastically.

Please, do not cut corners or you will be very sorry in the end. Step back, take a breather and do something before it is too late. Have the courage to speak up and make the world around you aware of it's folly. Unless of course you prefer to sink below the surface of quicksand at an early age, it's up to you really.