So, the cost to the company becoming large is that politics exist. There are too many stakeholders and they want to pull things in different directions and you

So, the cost to the company becoming large is that politics exist. There are too many stakeholders and they want to pull things in different directions and you have to be politically savvy in order to balance between them. This is not everyone's vibe and it is why a lot of Open Source software does better with a benevolent dictator than with a democratic process. For instance it's the reason that I don't contribute to Wikipedia. Once you realize that you're particular situation is a political problem the solution becomes obvious. You stop working on the “required upgrade”, citing that you are blocked on this other team. If possible, track your onboarding feature in the big company's issue tracker, and link the two bugs as blockers. The political side is, if somebody actually needed you doing this VM migration work, they need to escalate to this other team. Or, they need to give you a big juicy high-profile project to refactor your code, to not do whatever it was.. and this gives you plenty of space to also do all sorts of other things that you never get to budget refactoring time for. Your call whether you like the game once you know how to play, or whether you nope out like I did with Wikipedia.