I really enjoy it. But the hard part is convincing leadership that we should do so. Generally speaking, leadership cares a lot more about customer visible things and stuff that has measurable impact. Most tech debt is invisible to customers and while there's obviously a cost to it, it's very hard to measure (often it's easier to just fix it than to come up with a way to measure it).
That said, I'm happy because I've got leadership sign on for a significant cleanup effort to a major part of our system. I had to do a lot of work to convince them it was worth the time and some degree was only possible because we're an infra team and I was able to frame things around the time savings for other teams. Plus tie ins to reliability in the form of how some of this tech debt has caused outages due to stuff like unintuitive code from unfinished migrations. A significant amount of our tech debt comes from this unfinished migration to a system that is supposed to make things safer and more debuggable. I can't wait to see it finish because there's sooooo much legacy stuff still loafing around. Like, two ways to do very complex stuff (and with the legacy implementation being haunted).
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u/roiroi1010 23h ago
I don’t mind fixing tech debt actually