Steve is the guy who wrote Code Complete (get rev 2 if you buy) which I consider to be required reading if you want to be a professional developer and occasionally he'll have some pretty interesting stuff on his blog. This time it was about technical debt, a subject near and near to my heart because most businesses thoroughly understand the concept (if not the details) and most IT pros seem to not get it at all. My synopsis is that sometimes you have to make tradeoffs in business and that means sometimes we don't get to achieve IT perfection.
In my experience the people who understand the problems and can help the business make good decisions about when and where to cut corners go much further than the ones that don't. It's not black and white, but it's not one solid shade of gray either!
The blog entry is a lot more fun to read than my comments and you can find it here.
