Imagine that every time an engineer makes some quick-and-dirty fix to a piece of code—the sort of hack that will likely blow up one day and need to be fixed (again)—there’s an invisible ledger in which a loan is taken out against future engineering time. That engineer can borrow now to get the trains running again, but the bill will come due later, usually with interest.
Deferred Debts
Gifts, moral debts, and technical debt share logic.
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It is important to bear in mind that the source domain of the metaphor, the domain of financial transaction, itself has a morality: It is moral to pay your debts and immoral not to. When moral action is understood metaphorically in terms of financial transaction, financial morality is carried over to morality in general:
It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies.
To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, “in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received”
the growth of the bank account at lower interest rates may look linear in the first few years. But, in fact, growth goes faster and faster. The more is there, the more is added.
Moreover, interest payments on some technical code debt is higher than others. The more frequently a part of the codebase is read, invoked, and modified, the higher the interest payments for any technical debt in that code. Code that’s peripheral to a product or that rarely gets read and modified doesn’t affect overall development speed as much, even if it’s laden with technical debt.
Open-book play mediates a uniquely sophisticated type of human cooperation, namely “indirect reciprocity.” Person A helps person B, who helps C, who helps D. . . . The reciprocity between two individuals in a closed interaction is like barter. But indirect, pay-it-forward reciprocity is like money, where the common currency is reputation.