[arinlen]

> I want to believe it means one day we will do that TODO, it'll beat the priority of all the other tickets in the queue.

> But it never does, there's always some critical new feature sales wants, or something bigger on fire.

Why do you expect that random comments in the code will affect the priority of some tasks? Do you feel that stashing out-of-band info on pending tasks which were deemed not important regarding the project workload changes anything?

Also, if everything is always more important than the TODO item, that is the universe telling you that your TODO item should be deleted and that you should stop wasting your bandwidth with useless and unnecessary tasks.

[cseleborg]

That TODO item is just the receipt for a few bytes of technical debt you took with the universe. A few bytes is nothing compared to Management's roadmap, so it gets ignored. But have no doubt: the universe always returns to claim its technical debt...

[arinlen]

> That TODO item is just the receipt for a few bytes of technical debt you took with the universe.

It really isn't.

A TODO item that you feel does not justify a ticket is just a subjective nice-to-have expressed as noise/a declaration of intent with no intention to deliver, which ultimately only results in noise.

It's not even technical debt. At most, it's a pledge to goldplate something without being able to argue any tangible upside.

> A few bytes is nothing compared to Management's roadmap, so it gets ignored.

Bytes are irrelevant. Tickets also cost bytes. Tickets also track rationale and context. What really matters is allocated resources in order to deliver value.

The only reason your TODO item gets ignored is because the potential value it promises does not justify allocating resources to it.

People need to be smart about how they invest their time and effort. Tracking vague tasks deemed unnecessary or useless in a separate out-of-band source of info is not productive and ends up only creating noise and distractions.

[ParetoOptimal]

> At most, it's a pledge to goldplate something without being able to argue any tangible upside.

One person's gold plating with no tangible upside is another person's not be woken up by pagerduty at 3am ;)