[creesch]

I am not sure if I agree with the article, however I do agree that not every time code actually needs to be formatted.

> More than a few of them have come in with a strong belief that our code needed heavy refactoring.

The code might, but a blind spot for many developers is that just because they are not familiar with the code doesn't mean it is bad code. A lot of refactoring arguments I have seen over the years do boil down to "well, I just don't like the code" and are often made when someone just joins a team at a point where they haven't really had time to familiarize themselves with it.

The first point of the article sort of touches on this, but imho mainly misses the point. In a few teams I worked in we had a basic rule where you were not allowed to propose extensive refactoring in the months (3 or more) of being on the team. More specifically, you would be allowed to talk about it and brainstorm a bit but it would not be considered on the backlog or in sprints. After that, any proposal would be seriously considered. This was with various different types of applications, different languages and differently structured code. As it turned out, most of the time if they already did propose a refactor, it was severely scaled down from what they initially had in mind. Simply because they had worked with the code, gained a better understanding of why things were structured in certain ways and overall gotten more familiar with it. More importantly, the one time someone still proposed a more extensive refactoring of a certain code base it was much more tailored to the specific situation and environment as it otherwise would have been.

Edit: Looks like it is being touched on in the fourth point which I glossed over. I would have started with it rather than make this list of snippeted examples.