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Comment by null000 | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, hate that mindset.

My boss at my last job had the mind set of "refactoring only makes it different, not better". I asked him if I could spend some time refactoring our build system. He said no. I eventually did it anyway a few months later, spotted a bug due to the changes, and all of a sudden, build times were cut in half or in 10 in many instances.

Same story for a pretty nasty hunk of code we had for handling sparse arrays. Asked if I could refactor, got told no, did it anyway a while later, and all of a sudden a problem that had been considered borderline infeasible takes like 1 day of work.

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Refactoring isn't always the right decision, a good boss/lead needs to carefully weigh the pros & cons.

There is always some risk that refactoring makes code not only different, but worse. Corner-cases are often there for a reason, and refactoring sometimes misses them, especially when there isn't complete unit test coverage. Since it's often easier to get the core logic right, this likely leads to issues that are discovered in production.

No.

A good boss knows to get out of the way, clear a path if necessary.

If boss can't trust the minions to do the right thing, someone's got the wrong job.

There is no "right" thing. There may be an optimal thing from the development perspective and an optimal thing from the business perspective. Since the two pieces cannot exist without each other, both parties have to communicate effectively and trust each other to find the optimal decision for the combined problem space which may be sub-optimal when considered separately.

> If boss can't trust the minions to do the right thing, someone's got the wrong job.

There are many people who have wrong jobs.

More importantly, there are many people who are good, but not perfect. They do some aspects of their work greatly, other aspect less well. Good boss has some idea about that and is able to work with people who are not super great.

Least not last, even very good people often disagree about many things, including whether refactoring is needed or not or what kind of refactoring to do. Even if boss trusted all and listened all, he would still be told plenty of contradictory opinions.

The only time my improvements have even been noticed is the pointy haired boss said "Well, you should have thought of that sooner. What am I paying you for?"

That's the kind of joke that's great to chuckle over while you update your resume.

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