Manager: I’m so sick and tired of you devs whining about technical debt and how it’s slowing down our progress, so here’s the deal. You have until the end of this week to eliminate all technical debt in the codebase. After that I NEVER WANT TO HEAR YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT TECHNICAL DEBT EVER AGAIN!!!

Dev: …

Take it.

Dev: then I never want to hear about new features ever again.

tf, for real?

The real question is:
What is there left to manage, when all devs are gone for good?

# rm -rf ./

# git push --force

There boss, all tech debt has been removed.

I believe management (in general) actually loves technical debt. It doesn't show on their reports, and fixing it in the other hand would require spending their actual financial budget. So they much prefer it to remain some abstract concept those pesky techs are whining about, that's what they do all the time anyway.
(And maybe I might be a tiny bit cynical here...)
Nevertheless, I try to avoid that term if I can avoid it. Better directly refer to increased efforts required due to the unsuitable architecture, as this translates into time and money more management-intuitively.

Fundamental misunderstanding of technical debt. It is unavoidable, and can only be minimized by frequent proactive team efforts (scheduling maintenance, upgrades and creating flexible solutions from the get-go)

Dev: Guess what? I never want to hear from you again.

@webketje jesus at my company they define technical debt as features that were not merged into the product for a given milestone.

Shit code running like trash and being unreadable does not count of course.

So basically there is no time to work on technical debt because all we do is features basically.

@Lisk that was the case until some heroes in my company hacked some forecasting of billable hours spent on tech debt.
Suddenly bad feature-addicted managers had a veeeery red forecasted quarter ahead. And now tech debt is treated as an estimated liability rather than a tech issue. It has its problems, but it is better this way.

@JsonBoa congratulations on having these heroes, als well as management who actually listened to them.

I mention technical debt once in a while to management so that when it comes back biting the actual product in the butt they have to deal with it, and I can __almost__ say “told you so” 😊

That's what happen when devs don't allow product managers to be the ones making the choice of taking on technical debt.

@C0D4 don't forget to squash the git history into oblivion. increases the fun level, I guess.