this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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As a lead, I've recently started finding time to make progress on a lot of this, because a lot of the stuff I've seen over the years has just never been prioritized. Over the last few weeks I have:
You can do this as well. The problem is that I don't get any recognition for it, so this is completely driven by me making time for it and slipping it in w/ other changes. I document the more important ones, but I'm taking a risk w/ these fixes since any bugs I create in the process will not look good.
Whenever someone else on the team does something like this and is keeping up w/ their work, I try to lavish praise on them in the hopes that maybe they'll do it again.
Whenever the topic comes up with leadership, I try to explain it in financial terms.
They don't usually like to hear it, but when put in those terms, they don't have an argument against it. I'm sure if we could provide a statement showing we had $478,562.78 in tech debt at 4.75%, they'd be more understanding about paying it down.
Fortunately, my boss is sympathetic, but unfortunately, our stakeholders aren't. We are given time for tech debt (10-20%), but that hasn't been achievable recently due to a huge focus on delivery. We just reorged, and we're trying to get a bunch of people new to our business unit on-boarded w/ our product, and they have a variety of requirements that we need to meet for that to happen. Things should settle down in a few months, but in the meantime, I try to fix some low-hanging fruit that directly improves morale for the team.
My org is better than most, I think, but it's still an issue here. It's absolutely crazy the difference between prioritized and unprioritized tech debt. For example, our architect wants a thing, so it gets done same day. Our dev team wants a thing, and it takes months, if not years. It's getting better, but like anything, it's two steps forward (finally got to trunk-based dev) and one step back (other teams whining about changes).
I think everywhere I've worked has said "we have 20% time for tech debt" but has never actually done that. It's always "we need to ship this by end of week" and "the CEO wants us to add the thing we said we'd cut so we could make the deadline".
So far, we've only had one or two deadlines come from outside the dev team, and up until this year, we got close to that 20%. So hopefully it's a temporary change due to our new CEO trying to catch up to our competitors in a few areas.