Engineering managers will say things like -
- "I'll let the team decide what's best for them" & "code quality is our primary goal" -
but then they'll shoot down any & all requests to go back to some old piece of code and refactor/clean it, because of "deadlines".
Hypocrites, all of them.

@horus After reading your post one could think that OP is working in some startup which barely stays afloat and survives cheque to cheque on monthly basis and devs are shitting out ground breaking bleeding edge world changing features on monthly basis.

Why so dramatic? Relax. In reality when u see actual monthly output of this kind of companies its fucking hilarious. 6 weeks to add some dumb popup or do minor changes. Ground breaking!

I'm sure his company wouldnt close down if at least 1-2 sprints would be dedicated to refactor long standing issues.

@horus Yeah you got a point here... Fcking rat race with false sense of urgency

@zemaitis that's exactly right - we have a 6 week cycle and the manager has promised that he'll reserve 20% of each Sprint for handling tech debt - but those are fake promises, because when the time comes to work on that 20%, there's always a "critical" feature to ship.
Like I said, hypocrites, all of them.