Have you seen companies that use some sort of organizationally mandated data-driven approach to deciding when to invest in tech debt reduction? What worked well about that? What didn't work?I've talked to two engineers in the last few weeks who work at companies that:1. Use a combination of per-team/service metrics to decide when to invest in paying down tech debt. For example: incidents/pages...
It's the most beautiful thing I've seen. It has restored my faith in this country.
Let's keep this party going!”
I think people with your interests are really valuable. We've changed around what we index on for performance evals/promotions and what work we assign them so that we can better accommodate these sorts of work preferences and skills. If someone is happier working on an essential but unsexy, unloved corner of your systems or infrastructure, and they're also many times more productive in that area than other engineers who have no interest in it, then you might as well take advantage of it!
The key factor is making sure that the work those people are doing is truly high impact (for example, CI improvement might reduce deployment failures, improve team deployment velocity) and not simply maintenance for sake of abstract cleanliness.