Is technical debt always bad?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you named a cost, or only a principle.
The situation behind the question
An engineering manager wants a "debt sprint" every quarter. The backlog item list includes "migrate to the new ORM", "the auth module is ugly", "we still use callbacks in two files" and "the invoice generator has no tests and finance has been wrong twice".
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate can separate debt from taste. The question is a trap for people who have learned that debt is bad: the correct answer is that deliberate, bounded, named debt is a legitimate engineering strategy, and that most of what teams call debt is either an aesthetic preference or an unnamed risk.