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).