[pvarangot]

I think a director should only kind of "put value" to tech debt, making the mid-term and long term choices and assessing the risks. How to do the actual tech debt emission and how to deal with it when it hurts is more of a staff engineer thing.

If you think that as a director you'll have "power" to make actual week to week or month to month architectural or technical decisions you are thinking more of micro-managed projects and not of serious mid-sized or bigger engineering organizations.

[mlthoughts2018]

I mean the general prioritization of tech debt as a continually worthwhile time investment / required basic hygienic activity necessary for product health.

As a staff engineer, I provided inarguable evidence that tech debt had been ignored to the point of extreme risk of product failure and revenue loss, along with well-scoped and iterative approaches to pay down the tech debt with ideas and creative effort from the existing tech leads and experienced engineers.

It was just squashed for political reasons. In this case, product management happens to be the part of the hierarchy with all of the “the buck stops here authority” and since tech debt did not contribute to visibly obvious progress on vanity features and cosmetic product changes (that had not been rigorously derived from product feedback, expertise or needs), then tech debt was disallowed from entering any quarterly goals, etc.

Director or certain “org wide” IC roles could plausibly have authority to stop that.

Sorry if I have the impression this was about micromanaging weekly tech debt stuff... definitely not.