[stcredzero]

A good analogy for older management, which is disappearing as an extant object in the office, is that of the file room. Sometimes, you'll see a seeming "whiz kid" file clerk who seems to be far faster than normal, but it turns out that he's "faster" because he doesn't actually re-file and reorganize.

Refactoring is quite literally the same thing as re-filing and reorganizing physical files. Under the academic definition of refactoring, the "contents" (the functionality) is not changing. Only the organization is changing.

[Jtsummers]

A colleague and I developed a good routine for a while. He's a much faster programmer than me. But his code quality is usually much lower (not wrong, but often poorly structured and hard to maintain). He'd code fast, I'd code slow. Then I'd clean up his stuff while we waited for feedback on the system and he did other things. Refactoring work and the like, no meaningful (to an end user) changes.

This was effective. Except that management saw him as fast and so he kept getting more work, and completing it. But the quality wasn't there because no one went in behind him to keep it clean and tidy. Management never really saw the issue, they just thought the rest of us were bad programmers because we were so slow. We were slow because: 1) some of us (like me) work slowly; 2) the fast guy introduced a lot of technical debt (or we introduced it because we weren't given the cleanup time I used to have).

He's still a good programmer (in general), but without the support structure his products are far less useful than they same at first glance (due to the introduced technical debt).

[hinkley]

Having to work in and around very bad code slows everybody else down, we have a very prolific guy who creates his own jargon (inconsistently) and enjoys convolution like it’s an art form. Everybody else has to spend twice as long doing the most rudimentary features.

But management loves their heroes, so the people with high tolerance for complexity get promoted, and all the people I trust keep leaving...

[maxxxxx]

I have worked with people like that. They are really good for prototyping new stuff. But you definitely don't want their code go straight into a long term code base.