You can ignore it, tie it to unrelated company initiatives, or feign ignorance and simply not offer solutions that add to it. Or… you can adopt more above-board techniques such as Crawl/Walk/Run and the Reverse Farmer’s Rule, which reframe projects so that confronting tech debt is an upfront part of the plan.
Even though the situation you described is unfortunate, I don’t think it has any relationship with the concept of technical debt.
The term “technical debt” conveys the idea that a resource is invested in a way that requires to be repaid later. The whole concept revolves around the idea that taking shortcuts doesn’t eliminate the need to actually do the work to make things then right way. Rushing to a deliverable can leave a mess in your wake, but cleaning up that mess is also work that needs to be done and doesn’t magically go away.
It is the VERY CONCEPT of technical debt! Shortcut after shortcut shortcut… The company is literally shortcuts all the way down. No left at the company even knows how to work the erp properly. Because the person who set it up and customized it didn’t document or train anyone and then left… Technical debt. How about the mountain of product SKUs that were forced out the door never properly tested, filled with bugs and zero documentation… Left of the next guy… Technical debt. What about all those products not having real assembly or test documents and there being a literal single guy that knows how to test and program everything? No way to pass that info on besides a mountain of manufacturing engineering work? Technical debt.
What are you talking about dude!?!? Lolol.
That’s not technical debt. That isn’t even the definition of legacy code. That’s a mess and a whole set of problems, but technical debt ain’t one of it.
Removed by mod
To me it sounds like they took a lot of shortcuts and everyone from the team, barring the last engineer standing, were driven away by the looming Mount Debt