[dvtrn]

If I had to justify myself every time I took the basic initiative of fixing errant, problematic or poorly performing code just because it wasn’t ordained and blessed for me specifically I am out the door SO fucking fast…

Happy to have discussions and elucidate to others the change, and make whatever documentation necessary available, but if some leader somewhere things I’m a “problem” for merely having done the work…okay, let me solve that problem too: bye.

That’s an environment with serious trust issues manifesting as micro-management and I’ve got a severe case of post-micromanagement-stress-syndrome.

[therealdrag0]

I think where the valid problem is in terms of priority.

Sometimes engineers “feel” the need to refactor something that’s not related to a high priority project and end up burning days as they weren’t experienced/competent enough to really know where that string they pulled lead and got stuck fixing newly failing tests etc. and in the examples I have in mind the context isn’t the usual “product feature must deliver pressure”, it’s actually pure engineering project, where we had to rearchitect a system before our scaling hit a brick wall, so interesting engineering work by engineers for engineers and still some folks just chase squirrels.

I totally love the freedom I’ve enjoyed to fix things at my discretion in my career, but not everyone is good balancing the time/place or “picking your battles” and sometimes you gotta reign it in in others or the stuff that needs to get done won’t be.