&gt; As a technical contributor, I&#x27;ve been on-and-off frustrated my whole career by quantitative managers asking for promises of real profit before committing to cleaning up technical debt.<p>Agreed; though this is changing. More companies are starting to optimize their tech organizations for flexibility rather than low cost. The cost difference usually isn&#x27;t that much (no more than 25%) but the focus is on building and maintaining a technical product development capability. All products today are technical products, and if non-technical companies don&#x27;t develop a technical competency, they will wither and die (then their brands will be bought by whoever DOES have a technical competency).<p>This is a strategic move, and strategic moves shouldn&#x27;t be based purely off of numbers. They should be backed up by numbers, but market positioning and brand play into it a lot more than financial projections.