You can ignore it, tie it to unrelated company initiatives, or feign ignorance and simply not offer solutions that add to it. Or… you can adopt more above-board techniques such as Crawl/Walk/Run and the Reverse Farmer’s Rule, which reframe projects so that confronting tech debt is an upfront part of the plan.
I sometimes add a “tax” to the estimates of unrelated tasks, and use the extra hours to work on tech debt, unbeknown to upper management.
Not particularly ethical on my side, but… I’m the one that gets paged when things break down at night or on weekends, and I don’t care that upper management doesn’t care about that.
Refactor first to make the work easy, then do the work.
Ah, good old guerilla development
Is it really unethical if it benefits the organization? Even if that’s not really the goal.
The blogger acknowledge that the use of the word “unethical” as a hyperbole ton drive engagement.
The real-world issue is that we need to get stakeholders on board with the idea of having to do extra work that is not required to deliver a feature. If you tell a manager that you need to spend a month rewriting a system that was just launched, they will laugh at you.