Maybe it is just my experience, but in the last decade, employers stopped trying to recruit and retain top developers.
I have been a full time software engineer for more than a decade. In the 2010s, the mindset at tech giants seemed to be that they had to hire the best developers and do everything they could to keep them. The easiest way to do both was to be the best employer around. For example, Google had 20% time, many companies offered paid sabbaticals after so many years, and every office had catering once a week (if not a free cafeteria). That way, employees would be telling all of their friends how great it is to work for you and if they decide to look for other work, they would have to give up their cushy benefits.
Then, a few years before the pandemic, my employer switched to a different health insurance company and got the expected wave of complaints (the price of this drug went up, my doctor is not covered). HR responded with “our benefits package is above industry averages”. That is a refrain I have been hearing since, even after switching employers. The company is not trying to be the best employer that everyone wants to work at, they just want to be above average. They are saying “go ahead and look for another employer, but they are probably going to be just as bad”.
Obviously, this is just my view, so it is very possible that I have just been unlucky with my employers.
The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is…who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don’t care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that’s okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn’t reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn’t need you.
It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.
who is actually stopping them from dealing with it?
Management. Someone in management sets idiotic deadlines, then someone tells you “do X”, you estimate and come up with “it will take T amount of time” and production simply tells you “that’s too long, do it faster”
they don’t care about the details or maintenance
They don’t, they care about time. If there are 6 weeks to implement a feature that requires reworking half the product, they don’t care to know half the product needs to be reworked. They only care to hear you say that you’ll get it done in 6 weeks. And if you say that’s impossible, they tell you to do it anyway
you have to include the cost of managing technical debt
I do, and when I get asked why my time estimations are so long compared to those of other colleagues I say I include known costs that are required to develop the feature, as well as a buffer for known unknowns and unknown unknowns which, historically, has been necessary 100% of the time and never included causing us development difficulties and us running over cost and over time causing delays and quality issues that caused internal unhappiness, sometimes mandatory overtime, and usually a crappy product that the customers are unhappy with. That’s me doing a good job right? Except I got told to ignore all of that and only include the minimum time to get all of the dozens of tiny pieces working. We went over time, over cost, and each tiny piece “works” when taken in isolation but doesn’t really mix with everything else because there was no integration time and so each feature kinda just exists there on its own.
Then we do retrospectives in which we highlight all the process mistakes that we ran into only to do them all again next time. And I get blamed come performance review time because I was stressed and I wasn’t at the top of my game in the last year due to being chronically overburdened, overworked, and underpaid.