In any sane system, technical debt isn't backlogged and prioritized by project managers, it's simply a tax on all work. The point of "just doing" your technica

In any sane system, technical debt isn't backlogged and prioritized by project managers, it's simply a tax on all work. The point of "just doing" your technical debt isn't that you're stealing time from the PM, it's that when an engineer estimates their work, story points the next feature and everyone is deciding on the time frame, that process should implicitly include ~20% of time for you to continue to fix and update and improve things. Most PM's I've worked with do not care about that 20%, in fact, they're happy that we're taking the time to do it. They just want accurate estimates so they can tell stakeholders a realistic time frame and somewhat meet that goal. All you have to do is bake your 20% in and everyone is happy. Honestly if I worked for a company that micromanaged my time so closely that I was prevented from cleaning up technical debt and fixing things, I would still clean things up and be good at my job and let them fire me for it (or be searching and leave anyway). No PM, no middle manager, and no executive can ever make me sacrifice the quality of my work. They can only replace me with a monkey that won't have the same issue.