Good for you :) I think your situation sounds a bit different, where the manager either isn't very technical or isn't technical enough. Otherwise they'd be abl

Good for you :) I think your situation sounds a bit different, where the manager either isn't very technical or isn't technical enough. Otherwise they'd be able to see the problem for themselves. What I'm talking about are employees who have managers who understand the value of refactoring. What I find is that the people who get stuck in and most unambiguously improve hairy bits of the code (with full support of management) are usually not the ones who complain loudly and publicly about tech debt. Speaking as a manager for a sec here, what I'd watch out for in your case is to not be seen too much as a complainer. Rather than say "this codebase is shit why does nobody care" look at it as, "hey guys! why not come to my interesting 10 minute lightning talk on my favourite refactoring technique" and maybe don't phrase it as about tech debt if they aren't responsive to that kind of analogy. Managers in particular probably know their codebase is shit even if they aren't very technical, but labelling things as "tech debt" is always tricky because it's entirely possible that the debt was created by colleagues or those very same managers themselves, and whilst financial debt is well defined and measurable, tech debt is just an analogy. They may not even agree that any given bit of code is a problem.