something I said in an e-mail thread today that I thought was worth reposting here:
The biggest part of paying technical debt is letting the dev team know that they are empowered to fix things and that they can take the time to do things right. Good developers hate looking at crappy code, their first response is always to fix it. If they don’t believe that they can (and are expected to), they will just hack around bad code with more bad code.