[apalmer]

I think there is a minimum floor that should be allocated to this kind of work.

It doesn’t make sense to clean everything to a perfect condition but there should be some amount of ‘keep your room clean’ level of hygiene that’s maintained

[wpietri]

Exactly. Professional kitchens are very busy, time-sensitive places. But most of the good ones work pretty clean. Not because they're aesthetically fussy, but because they understand that being pretty fast requires being pretty clean.

There's a bit from Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential that really resonates with me along these lines:

Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system... The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of a rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel. “You see this?” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm. “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now.”

Having a reasonably tidy codebase that the whole team understands well is very much like that for me.

[kl4m]

Also discussed at length in the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas

[Archelaos]

I think "cleaning up x" should just be handled as any other to-do-list item. That means evaluating its cost and benefits in context with the other items on the list. Then do what is on position one, then on position two, then on position three, ... Re-evaluate the list from time to time.

[wpietri]

Fine in theory, but often bad in practice, because in a lot of places prioritization is done by people with little or no technical background and lots of incentive to show progress.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but my general preference is a black budget plus explicit "credit card" usage. E.g., the team has high standards for any new feature work and quietly spends 15% of their time every week on continuous technical improvement. If the product manager wants to break the normal standards and take on technical debt (e.g., rush have feature X ready for trade show), then you break the work into "rush to add feature X" and "clean up feature X mess". The first gets done before the trade show, the second after.

And personally, if a product manager doesn't honor the deal, I say they get their credit card taken away for a while, because they've proven they can't be trusted to do right by the team and the company.

[Archelaos]

Actually, I have an explicit agreement that I can spent around 10% of my time on issues of my choice, without having to check with the management. And sometimes, for bigger refactoring work, I have negotiated explicit to-do-list items. On the other side, in the process of re-evaluating the to-dos, I myself often recommend to postpone refactoring when I see the need for implementing a certain feature fast or when I have the impression that the code quality is "good enough" for the moment. Since management trusts me that I can appreciate the business perspective as well, I actually have little trouble asserting myself when I think a particular refactoring issue should be prioritized.

So in my case, it works in practice.

[wpietri]

No, treating as "any other to-do list item" does not work fine in practice. And you know it, because you spend 10% of your time on work specifically kept out of the normal to-do list flow.

And I'm glad you have a very good relationship with your business stakeholders, but please recognize that's not the modal case, and that giving advice as if it were is going to be bad for people with other circumstances.