Reframing Tech Debt
I think this is a mistake a lot of people make:<p>&gt; Carving out time to pay down tech debt requires buy-in from leadership.<p>Not in my experience! I think one can do pretty well a) refusing to put debt in to begin with, and b) for any new work, including necessary cleanup of what you&#x27;ll be touching in the estimates.<p>Some years back I had an explicit understanding with a product manager: the engineers would track tech debt and take care of it in small slices over time. He could always ask for details, but absent his curiosity, we&#x27;d just leave him out of it, doing a little bit every week so that things always stayed in good enough shape that we would keep our velocity high and our surprises low. Early on he asked a couple of times, but he quickly realized that to him it was entirely boring.<p>I think it&#x27;s a mistake to ask non-experts to prioritize things they don&#x27;t understand. You&#x27;re not going to ask your execs if it&#x27;s ok for you to take time to eat or brush your teeth. You equally shouldn&#x27;t ask them if it&#x27;s ok to be a responsible professional and do things like writing tests and keeping the code base reasonably clean. That should just be part of the deal; any exceptions should be temporary and carefully negotiated.