[saalweachter]

It's weird when you are part of a larger org; you still worry about technical debt as a team, but you have to also deal with, like, institutional technical debt.

Realistically, something like 10-20% of the engineering resources at a company like Google or Microsoft are going to service technical debt at an institutional level. Sometimes it is literally all an engineer does, like maintain a deprecated system that can't be turned down for five years or a team migrating large systems from the old and busted to the new hotness, sometimes it's just the tax on engineers doing other projects to work around the technical debt. It's just what happens when you have tens of thousands of engineers working for decades.