> But that's sometimes okay, it's a lifecycle of software. If business doesn't schedule maintenance, then maintenance schedules itself. The job of a good engineer is to make business types in the know about and let them decide.
It's complicated. I've worked on a product that had accumulated 15 years of tech debt. This all happened for very good reasons. The previous leadership often needed to ship features to get contracts signed and to make payroll.
However, paying that debt off had become very expensive and getting meaningful returns from these improvements took a long time. The most direct value came out of making tests more comprehensive and faster. However, beyond that benefits were only tangible over months to years and only if you worked on the right code area. In a large corporation leadership tenure in a role is often shorter than that. So the personal incentives for much of leadership was to just ignore the tech debt.
It's an extreme example but it's where you can get yourself.
Edit: I am honestly not sure I have a strong recommendation from this, other than "watch the tech debt and pay it off when you get breathing room". But then original company leadership AFAIK never paid most of the cost (if any?) of the accumulated debt and had AFAIK two(!) nice exits from it.
It's complicated. I've worked on a product that had accumulated 15 years of tech debt. This all happened for very good reasons. The previous leadership often needed to ship features to get contracts signed and to make payroll.
However, paying that debt off had become very expensive and getting meaningful returns from these improvements took a long time. The most direct value came out of making tests more comprehensive and faster. However, beyond that benefits were only tangible over months to years and only if you worked on the right code area. In a large corporation leadership tenure in a role is often shorter than that. So the personal incentives for much of leadership was to just ignore the tech debt.
It's an extreme example but it's where you can get yourself.
Edit: I am honestly not sure I have a strong recommendation from this, other than "watch the tech debt and pay it off when you get breathing room". But then original company leadership AFAIK never paid most of the cost (if any?) of the accumulated debt and had AFAIK two(!) nice exits from it.