[yarekt]

Consider a case where every non trivial refactor ends up in several rabbit holes, requiring lengthy meetings with lots of people to discuss, and many disagreements about direction. And in light of that the trivial refactors start to feel like you’re taking a bucketful out of a tsunami.

What ends up happening is it’s much more impactful for the team to just focus on shipping what they can, partly because they don’t have the tools/procedures/experience (anymore) for dealing with tech debt in this context

[noisy_boy]

And that is exactly how the cruft I see has built over many years (well before I joined the team). It is not that devs before me were not smart; they just focused on doing the bare minimum without any attention to keeping the code easier to manage and reason with. An append only garden.