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My god, this describes me to a T, and every one of those bullet points sounds like a fantastic way to spend time working. It was only when I caused a production issue due to a refactor that I gave up on trying to making a behemoth codebase better for everyone who has to work in it, and that’s when work got sad and boring.

I will take this to my team.

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We can’t be afraid to change code. If your code change caused a production issue, what’s stopping someone else from causing a similar issue even if they aren’t refactoring?

I have worked on teams where people don’t know what the code does and the test coverage is spotty. It’s a minefield and only a matter of time before something breaks. It sounds like your refactoring work was a much needed step in the right direction.

There needs to be sufficient testing and monitoring in place to catch problems earlier than production, so that people are not afraid to change code.

Would you be willing to share more details about the specific problem you ran into?

Yep, me too! Please come to Google. This is the only place that I have ever worked that values code quality and testability, rather than just saying it values these and then letting everything fly to meet some arbitrary deadlines. There are downsides to working here as well though. Happy to chat! gkrimer@geeeeeemail.com

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