I think that may companies need a fundamental shift in managerial culture before they take technical debt even remotely seriously.
The only way I've ever managed to do anything about technical debt was by hiding the fact that I was doing it - since it was completely impossible to get any level of managerial buy in or even permission.
It shouldn't have had to be that way, I should've had higher level support, other developers to work with and competent testers - working in that situation ultimately left me never wanting to write software for anyone else ever again.
It's a disease of reckless incompetence, and it permeates the managerial structures of large swathes of the software development industry.
Same here, I'd always pay off a little debt here and there and the busy-waiters would be circling my desk asking for status -- from the busy body product owners to the nitpicking directors at their weekly inquisitions, there's a whole class of parasites whose only contribution is to trumpet how late we are and insist on asking 'how long will this take?'
I got it too the point where the standard changes took a fraction of the time to implement compared to what it would've been operating on the initial code base.
In fact, some of the functionality that I ultimately implemented would not simply have taken longer, it would have been impossible to implement without introducing world ending bugs.
None of that mattered. Nothing that I ever said or did in that place meant a fucking thing to anyone.
Where have you been all my life bro! Nobody gets it any more -- precisely the attitude needed in this industry; we need to turn the tables and take our craft back in-house
The only way I've ever managed to do anything about technical debt was by hiding the fact that I was doing it - since it was completely impossible to get any level of managerial buy in or even permission.
It shouldn't have had to be that way, I should've had higher level support, other developers to work with and competent testers - working in that situation ultimately left me never wanting to write software for anyone else ever again.
It's a disease of reckless incompetence, and it permeates the managerial structures of large swathes of the software development industry.