This thinking implies nothing is worth doing unless it has a clearly articulable direct business value whereas a lot of technical debt simply doesn't. When the

This thinking implies nothing is worth doing unless it has a clearly articulable direct business value whereas a lot of technical debt simply doesn't. When the only people affected by a problem are people who have already spent their money or people who have no autonomy it's unlikely the decision makers will decide to investigate and fix it. If you're lucky you can convince decision makers that there is an impact to hiring or efficiency but in my experience these arguments are extremely challenging to make in the face of other stuff that decision makers feel directly impact business, and for good reason. I'd say this is a big reason autonomy is crucial when it comes to cultivating a curious team because without autonomy you are limited to things that can achieve consensus in an environment where people inherently have different interests to attend to. I feel like the "20% time" paradigm where one day out of the week is left up to the developer to schedule (within reason) is the right way to balance the conflicts of interest and still leave room for people to be curious.