Technical Debt: When to Pay It Down vs. When to Just Live With It

Tomas Peluritis

Every team has code that makes them cringe. Legacy pipelines nobody dares touch, "temporary" tables that became the source of truth, and SQL queries that outlived three team leads. We call it technical debt, and the instinct is always the same: fix it. But should we? After migrating from Redshift to Snowflake, learning PIG just to rewrite a pipeline deprecated months later, and surviving Airflow OOM kills, I have opinions. And maybe a framework slightly better than "it depends."