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That's also a problem in medical software. People are so risk averse that they avoid relatively small changes until the whole thing comes crashing down eventually.

I have also seen the trend that good developers start to leave and the only people left are low quality developers or outsourcing companies who don't care about what they work on.

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Another aspect is the size of the business and the related dilution of power and responsibility.

Repaying technical debt in production software means introducing new bugs, instability, change. Users will have to adapt, business KPIs will suffer. The upside won't be visible. No sane middle manager would agree to that, because this will negatively impact his career path.

As a solution, I advise organizing work in maintenance teams rather than by project. Having personal responsibility for each feature or process or product also helps.

In the end working on large long term projects that a lot of people depend on just is not much fun :). Working on smaller projects where you can make quick changes is much more satisfying.

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