Exactly right. Thank you for writing this. I’m in a similar position, where I’m responsible for reducing tech debt, reducing internal operating costs, while ensuring the infrastructure still operates, and while being responsible for testing and pushing out releases on time. With 4 people on my team.
If we dropped every new feature today and just focused on tech debt, it would take us months to catch up. But in the meantime, the show must go on, so we just continue accumulating debt. Nobody in engineering, nobody in sales or product management even has the power to stop the madness - this is all driven from the customers. And it gets worse if you are a b2c business or provide services to a government or two - you just don’t have much wiggle room.