Highlight from How to influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

Organizational interest comes in waves. When it’s reliability time, VPs are desperate to be doing something. They want to come up with plausible-sounding reliability projects that they can fund, because they need to go to their bosses and point at what they’re doing for reliability, but they don’t have the skillset to do it on their own. They’re typically happy to fund anything that the engineering team suggests. On the other hand, when the organization’s attention is focused somewhere else - say, on a big new product ship - the last thing they want is for engineers to spend their time on an internal reliability-focused refactor that’s invisible to customers.