[hammerdr]

We can all certainly try :) And, fighting in the trenches every day (taking some time to do some refactoring instead of calling a feature done) is a great place to start.

However, the code rot really needs to be understood by the upper management of IT. Having a solid grasp of technical debt, how much it hurts, how much debt you can take on and how long it takes to pay that down is the responsibility of any manager of IT departments. If management doesn't understand this, they are setting the products up to fail every 3-5 years no matter how hard the developers work at the leaf nodes.