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 d

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.