this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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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.