In some workplaces, technical debt isn’t just tolerated—it’s quietly reassigned.
This phase began with pushback for doing something deceptively simple: naming the problem.
I asked for a task split to account for legacy cleanup. I called out that the handed-over branch hadn’t been synced with master for nearly four months and classified it plainly as technical debt. The response was defensive.
“This is software engineering.”
“You don’t get a fresh branch.”
What those statements really meant was: this disorder is normalized, and questioning it is inconvenient.
The feature itself had been picked months before I joined. Context was missing. KT was incomplete. Access delays were real. Yet the narrative forming around me was about “1.5 months without dev work”—as if blocked time was inactivity.
By Day 5, the feedback escalated into questioning my project understanding. That’s when it became clear: if left private, this would quietly become my problem.
So I changed tactics.
I raised the issue in standup—not emotionally, not defensively, but structurally. I separated feature delivery from legacy reconciliation and insisted they be treated as distinct tasks. No silent scope creep.
That moment shifted the room.
Others acknowledged they had reused parts of the same legacy branch. Nothing from it had ever gone to production. What felt like an individual “performance issue” was suddenly visible as a shared system failure.
Day 6 brought a softer tone. Conciliation. Offers of explanation. Validation that my questions were “good.”
I accepted the reset—without forgetting why it was needed.
This wasn’t about winning an argument.
It was about refusing to inherit blame for undocumented debt.
Silence protects dysfunction.
Structure protects engineers.
This was the day the engagement subtly changed—from absorption to self-respect.
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