Measure no, but only engineers care about that (and I'm not even saying that they're right, engineers care a whole lot too much about hard data). You can show alternative solutions, estimate, make assumptions, even make up numbers and boom, you have "data" to show you improved things. You don't even have to lie: you can be very open that these are assumptions and made-up numbers, that it's just a story, what's important is that people come out with confidence that thanks to you, things are better by a bit/a lot/enormously.

Really you can. You look at the engineers who create steaming piles, and you look at the ones who don't. Over a year or two, the difference is easy to spot. For people who care to spot it.

If there's no competent front-line technical management who can successfully make this simple comparison, then, sure, in that case the team may be fucked.

Yes, and ironically there are promotion ladders that explicitly call out "staff engineers identify problems before they become an issue". But we all know that in reality no manager-leader is ever going to fix problems eagerly, if they even agree with someone's prediction that that thing is really going to become a problem.

I once used the analogy of the PM coming to the shop with a car that had a barely running engine and broken windows, and he's only letting me fix the windows.

His response: "I can sell a good looking car and then charge them for a better running engine"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ hits a little too close to home.

> All anyone cares about is feature release velocity.

And at the same time it's impossible to convince tech illiterate people that reducing complexity likely increases velocity.

Seemingly we only get budget to add, never to remove. Also for silver bullets, if Big Tech promises a [thing] you can pay for that magically resolves all your issues, management seems enchanted and throws money at it.

You can reduce a single type of incident by 80%. The overall incident rate for this particular type wasn't high enough to kill your company, but it's still a big number on your promotion packet.

The "time to market" folks finally have everything they could hope for, let's see all of that business value they claim is being missed due to pesky things like security, quality, and scalability checks.