Bad code is only one kind of "technical debt" and it's the worst kind. Technical debt could also be choosing not to add a feature. If you document the shortfall (say, your system won't scale beyond a single-node database, because you aren't going to need that for at least a year) and why it is there, you can mitigate the damage and make it possible for future users and maintainers to figure out what's going on.
Code quality problems are, as expressed in the OP, an unknown unknown. It's rare that anyone has a handle on just how bad things are, until it's too late. Also, there are sociological issues with legacy rescue projects that businesspeople, who'd rather think of programmers as fairly interchangeable, don't like to contend with: maintenance is only effective if done by high-quality programmers, but it's expensive and often hard as hell to motivate good people to do it. A pat on the back and a 10% bonus won't do it, because it doesn't come close to offsetting the career costs of doing undesirable work.
There is an apocryphal story about a trader buying chocolate santa futures and forgetting to sell them on. Eventually a truckload turned up at the Wall Street headquarters.
This has little to do with the subject itself, but this has actually happened, sort-of. Futures contracts usually don't include Wall Street as a delivery location, so it's not like the trader ends up taking physical delivery at the workplace. The contract will specify where one must make or take delivery, and most delivery locations are in the Midwest or Plains.
When a trader fucks up and has to make or take delivery, there are services that handle it, but it's expensive. If you get stuck taking delivery of, say, $500,000 worth of butter, you'll probably have to pay the agency 50 cents on the dollar, or $250,000, to handle the task of getting your surplus butter to a wholesaler. It hurts pretty bad.
Code quality problems are, as expressed in the OP, an unknown unknown. It's rare that anyone has a handle on just how bad things are, until it's too late. Also, there are sociological issues with legacy rescue projects that businesspeople, who'd rather think of programmers as fairly interchangeable, don't like to contend with: maintenance is only effective if done by high-quality programmers, but it's expensive and often hard as hell to motivate good people to do it. A pat on the back and a 10% bonus won't do it, because it doesn't come close to offsetting the career costs of doing undesirable work.
There is an apocryphal story about a trader buying chocolate santa futures and forgetting to sell them on. Eventually a truckload turned up at the Wall Street headquarters.
This has little to do with the subject itself, but this has actually happened, sort-of. Futures contracts usually don't include Wall Street as a delivery location, so it's not like the trader ends up taking physical delivery at the workplace. The contract will specify where one must make or take delivery, and most delivery locations are in the Midwest or Plains.
When a trader fucks up and has to make or take delivery, there are services that handle it, but it's expensive. If you get stuck taking delivery of, say, $500,000 worth of butter, you'll probably have to pay the agency 50 cents on the dollar, or $250,000, to handle the task of getting your surplus butter to a wholesaler. It hurts pretty bad.