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If that cluster is profitable it serves business just fine. If you can prove poor system quality is costing money, explain that to management and they'll authorize spending resources on reactors.

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Sometimes it just appears profitable. It may be adding all kinds of costs that can't be tracked. If it's a public release then it may be doing long term harm to the companies reputation.

OMG this. Technical debt amounts to an externality put on engineering by management, and it's all too easy for most to ignore the complaints of engineers. The solution is not (as others have proposed in comments here) to "just do the work" as that serves to bury ever deeper the cost being imposed on the future of the organization.

The cost of technical debt is obviously much harder to quantify than the value of new features (though most companies don't even do that well), so most people don't try and that's why we end up constantly prioritizing features over paying down technical debt.

However, tasks that improve engineer productivity, like speeding up the test suite, or adding automated tests, removing unneeded code, a badly needed refactor on a critical piece of code can not only makes new features quicker to develop, but also makes the technical improvements quicker to develop. Features have the opposite effect.

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