Complaining about technical debt is not just pointless, it's actively harmful. Stop it. I get it. It's natural to be frustrated by all the cruft that is left behind when organizations grow and change, and there's often precious little effort spent to improve old codebases.

Here's the thing, though: Complaining makes it worse.

One of the biggest challenges in tech is getting people to work on the items in the @jnewland Magic Quadrant of important but uninteresting work. Jesse presented this model years ago and I've used it ever since to describe this phenomenon. If you want to know why ops folks seem grumpy a lot, this is a big part of it. "If nobody owns it, ops owns it" is one of my favorite lines. This is one reason I like the "you build it, you run it" model of product ownership so much.