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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Focus on the problem at hand and don't chase technical debt unless it impedes you. If not, open an issue, leave a TODO, etc. Nothing bothers me more than finding a bunch of changes in a pull request completely unrelated to the scope of the issue, and they're most often a time sink for the developer chasing them.

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Some jobs don't allow for time to really address tech debt. Lots of us get in the habit of sneaking improvements in as we go because otherwise they never get done.

Yes. If I am doing refactoring work during a sprint, I don't sneak features the business is pushing for into the pull request. I am both held responsible for code being kept maintainable and almost never given any time to keep code maintainable, so I refactor as I go.

Good code is produced when people can easily improve it. In my experience, people leave too much crap untouched because of unnecessary barriers, and having to create a new issue is definitely one of them.

I'd rather review 10 extra files every PR if it means the code is improving. If you keep doing this, eventually there won't be so many extra changes because they're fixed already.

I'm curious, why do you think fixing tech debt is a time sink?

I see issues like contracts--they have a scope and you are agreeing to work on that scope. If you go beyond the scope, you're breaking the contract. Someone might already be fixing the tech debt via a different issue, you may need to submit a new RFC, etc. Management and PMs will also start to notice and not appreciate the risk that your fixes might cause to the release.

I think the point is that these tech debt changes are often not really making the code better. Also, when the PR has other things going on, then it's harder to properly give a CR on the actual rason the code was changed. Sure, sometimes a person is able to remove a bunch of unnecessarily complex code or what not as part of the change, which I think are generally good.

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