need to bake some refactoring time into regular tickets. PM should only care about features, while software devs should provide reliable estimates on the velocity of sustainable software development
Ah, but when Alex can do 4 tickets a week baking refactoring, maintenance, tests, and observability into their work, and Blake can do 8 tickets a week focusing only on features, who do you think is going to get promoted?
These incentives then quickly devolve into a classic prisoner's dilemma. There's huge incentives to "defect" by producing quick-but-dirty work. You get the benefit of looking like you're producing rapidly, but you've made the collective experience a little bit worse.
hm... it the team is agile, then everyone does refactoring and it is team lead's job to assign tickets and evaluate. Team lead should have enough context to compare apple to apples.
if your work improving codebase is not valued, then its probably time to change job or just stop caring about code sustainability - let the business accrue technical debt, which is sometimes viable strategy if your runway and planning horizon is limited