Excellent article. The problem with solving the technical debt problem is that it is only really recognized by developers. Developers need to stop enabling technical debt. How do they do that? With Herculean effort they manage to wade through decades (yes sometimes decades) of legacy code to add new features, mitigate vulnerabilities and patch code that now breaks because it wasn't designed for today's environment.

I have a saying that has proven more true than false in my life.

Nothing good happens until something bad happens.

Unfortunately, technical debt will never be repaid until something really, really bad happens. A prolonged outage, a security breach, customer defection or the one guy who you could count on to kick the boiler in just the right place gets run over by a bus.

Developers should stop trying to get management to repay technical debt. It's useless. Sometimes it just makes more sense to sit back, grab a cooler and lawn chair and watch the train wreck. Maybe then someone will fix the tracks.