Hello Reader,

A few years ago, I proposed adding automated rollback capabilities to our deployment pipeline. The system was fragile—on-call rotations were painful, incidents were frequent, and small changes could break the entire workflow. The refactor wouldn't ship new features, but it would make everything more reliable six months from now.

The response was polite: "Sounds sensible. Not right now. Let's revisit next quarter." Next quarter came with new deadlines, new priorities and other urgent issues.

Nothing was ever wrong with the idea. It was just never urgent enough.

The tension most engineers live with

Engineers are trained to think in systems. They see how today's shortcuts become tomorrow's outages and understand that resilience, tooling, and improvements are not optional if you plan to scale. But they work inside organizations optimized for the near term—organizations where roadmaps reward visible progress and deadlines reward urgency. Maintenance waits in favor of new features.

So engineers learn a quiet lesson: long term work is important, but short term work is rewarded.

Why this keeps happening

From a leadership perspective, this behavior makes sense. Leaders are evaluated on delivery, momentum, and hitting targets that customers and executives care about. The cost of technical debt is abstract until it explodes, while the cost of missing a deadline is immediate and visible so urgency wins.

This happens not because leaders undervalue foresight, but because foresight is harder to measure, harder to defend, and easier to delay. The result is a culture where prevention is optional, but firefighting is celebrated.

What engineers get wrong about this fight

Many engineers try to win this battle on principle. They argue correctness, they argue best practice, they argue future pain. They are often right but being right about the long term is not the same as making it matter in the short term. Work that only pays off later struggles to survive in environments that need to solve today's problems.

The reframing that changes the conversation

Long term work only gets funded when it solves a short term problem someone already feels—resilience work that reduces on-call pain, tooling that speeds up delivery next sprint, refactors that lower incident risk before a launch. The work doesn't only focus on the long term. It becomes visible in the present.

Engineers who succeed here stop positioning this work as investment for the future. They frame it as removing current friction, reducing near-term risk, or protecting a deadline leadership already cares about.

A more effective way to advocate for long term work

Instead of asking for time to "clean things up," anchor your proposal to a concrete pressure that already exists: what slows teams down today, what makes releases risky this quarter, what is likely to break during the next scale event. When long term work is tied to an immediate concern, it stops sounding like a nice-to-have. It becomes a risk management issue. That's a language leaders understand.

Short term cultures are not going away. But engineers who learn how to translate foresight into urgency stop fighting uphill battles. Their work survives planning cycles, systems age better, and teams burn out less.

Long term thinking doesn't lose because it's wrong. It loses because it's framed too far in the future.

That's all for this week.