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.
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.