Every data engineer on your team loses 2 days per week to technical debt. That’s time they can’t spend building.
That’s 16 hours per engineer, every week, gone to wrestling with historical decisions instead of building new capabilities.
For a 10-person team, you’re losing 160 hours per week. 640 hours per month. The equivalent of 4 full-time engineers doing nothing but fighting fires.
The pattern I see repeatedly: Teams address symptoms (slow pipelines, brittle queries) instead of root causes. They optimize the code when they should be questioning the architectural decisions that created the mess.
Design and architectural choices are the primary contributors. The temporary integration from 2021. The “we’ll refactor later” that never happens. The copy-paste solution that multiplied across 47 pipelines.
Monday and Tuesday: debugging the same pipeline failures. Wednesday through Friday: maybe you get to actual development. Maybe.
Every architectural shortcut you take today becomes someone’s Monday problem tomorrow.
The fix isn’t heroic refactoring sprints. It’s ring-fencing consistent capacity for debt reduction - every sprint, non-negotiable. Treat it like infrastructure maintenance, not a project.
How much of your sprint actually goes to building new capabilities?