[thefaux]

Yes, there are often a lot of organizational barriers that inhibit doing the right thing. Most organizations like to talk a big game about how innovative they are, but they really just want to keep doing the same things that they've always done.

I have been in the situation where over a period of time I inherited a lot of code that was written by my boss and absolutely critical to our business. Over time I began to see that they had made a number of poor design choices that made it very difficult to work with some of these internal frameworks. For example, there was a lot of global state passed around that kind of worked in production, but made it impossible to run tests in parallel (as well as making some of them flaky even when run serially). I introduced an internal dependency injection framework that leveraged some unusual host language features to remove the global state without painfully having to add a bunch of parameters to every function/class that would have to be passed around. This allowed the tests to run in parallel and completely removed the flaky failures. At the time I introduced the changes, they reduced the time to run all the tests from about 3 minutes to 20 seconds with no flaky failures. This was a major quality of life improvement not only for me, but for everyone else working on this part of the system.

Was this work rewarded? No. What I didn't consider when undertaking the refactoring was that I was implicitly making my boss look bad by fixing the systemic problems that they'd introduced. Even worse, I used techniques that were unfamiliar to them which was a further blow to their ego, though they wouldn't have admitted this at the time. Instead, they complained that they didn't understand some of my techniques rather than seriously try to learn what I'd done and appreciate the benefits that it brought. Ultimately, it became soul crushing to realize that they were more invested in doing things the way they'd always done them then to learn how to do things better (or at least offer constructive feedback beyond "I don't superficially understand this so it must be bad"). When you are in this situation, advancement becomes almost impossible because you have now become a threat to your boss, who will never make the mistake of allowing you to be promoted to their level or beyond.

I still think we should all strive to do the best work that we can because ultimately you should feel proud of the work that you've done. But this often comes with a major cost (which may ultimately be that you are forced to leave the organization).