It also depends a lot on the business context, whether you can trust leadership to respect technical debt or not.
My first big assignment on my first job I presented a demo ~1mo into a 3 mo project. It didn't persist data, or work on more than one host, and it saved state to a json file on the one server I manually copied the executable to. Everyone is the demo doesn't see that, they see it working as expected. The first question I got was why can't we ship this today, it appears to work as expected?. PMs, SDMs, etc care a lot less about the "it takes a while to set up something that scales, and stores data in a safe encrypted database, etc" when they see something that works.
Now whenever I do a demo like that I append "DEMO DATA:" to any visible string, and ensure I demo at least one failed behavior, just to guarantee that no one thinks it can be shipped that day (if I know it can't).
Most C-suite folks, these days, are running leveraged up the yin-yang, financially; so I suspect that "tech debt" is almost meaningless.
I'm trying to remember if I have ever known an [American] manager, that gave the slightest damn about tech debt...
...
Nope. I got nothing.
I’ve just developed good coding habits, so even my lashups are better than many people’s final ship code.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
