it’s just hard for me to fathom because I worked for a large company where nobody’s funds were at risk… even still we would get torn apart for any TODOs in the code and had quarterly sprints to eliminate tech debt
The large (not super yuuuge, but still NASDAQ listed) company I worked for, would act and say the same. So devs stopped adding or deleted // TODO markers and added an item to the backlog instead (or not.) Guess which backlog items never got enough prio to be tackled?
PMs got promoted for new shiny features and the ability to track an uptick in usage and associate it with the aforementioned new shiny thing. There was no metric impacting promotion for improving code stability, reducing tech debt, or removing unused features / dead code. So that didn't happen. In fact, it was almost the opposite: There was a metric for responding to and participating in "war rooms" when stuff broke. So we had more of those than PRs addressing tech debt.
I managed to sneak in a fair few fixes during my time there. But only because I valued my sanity more than my prestige for how I am handling outages during on-call stints. And my reviewers were happy that I'd tackle them so they, in turn, can spend more time on scoring points for a promotion.
The large (not super yuuuge, but still NASDAQ listed) company I worked for, would act and say the same.
So devs stopped adding or deleted
// TODOmarkers and added an item to the backlog instead (or not.)Guess which backlog items never got enough prio to be tackled?
PMs got promoted for new shiny features and the ability to track an uptick in usage and associate it with the aforementioned new shiny thing.
There was no metric impacting promotion for improving code stability, reducing tech debt, or removing unused features / dead code. So that didn't happen.
In fact, it was almost the opposite: There was a metric for responding to and participating in "war rooms" when stuff broke. So we had more of those than PRs addressing tech debt.
I managed to sneak in a fair few fixes during my time there. But only because I valued my sanity more than my prestige for how I am handling outages during on-call stints. And my reviewers were happy that I'd tackle them so they, in turn, can spend more time on scoring points for a promotion.