[ISL]

As a cautionary tale -- make sure that there is fundamental institutional support for the removal of said garbage. If cleaning up the garbage requires help from someone else within the institution, verify that they can and will help you before you begin.

Source: I volunteered to remove some challenging/delicate garbage without sufficient institutional support. The lost productivity has had a marked impact on both my career and our team's success.

[stack_underflow]

I'll second this with a personal anecdote as well.

If you do want to do this, clear it explicitly with your manager/person doing your perf reviews...

I had a non-technical manager who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features and received a negative review because of it, even after explaining the situation.

[dominotw]

> who thought I was "avoiding" work by doing this instead of shipping new features

Haha same. Mine thought these were unfinished tasks from my previous work and only have to do it now because i was slacking before.

[nurettin]

this is true, I've seen someone here lamenting about how people changed his callback code to async while he was adding new functionality which resulted in him changing jobs.