[idrios]

I hate this article. It's a very smug way of blaming the dev who's just trying to make the app better when it's probably the culture that's the problem. Bad refactors usually happen because the person doing the refactor is getting a ton of pushback on it -- they probably underestimated the effort involved and are getting chewed out for taking too long on it, so they cut corners that might accidentally lose functionality, or they don't finish the desired abstraction / clean code they were going for which leaves the code less readable.

For a dev that's a new hire, refactoring the code is also a way for them to feel ownership over it. The PM should be happy that they're thinking about the way the code works and the way the code should work. It's on the company to have review & qa processes that catch problems before they lead to downtime.

I don't disagree that some of the examples given are bad refactors, but in regards to adding inconsistency I see that happen a lot more when rushing out new features or bug fixes than when refactoring; usually the refactor is the effort trying to establish some kind of consistency. And example 5 isn't a refactor it's just removing functionality. If that was the intent, the person should be told not to do that. If it's an accidental side effect of some larger refactor effort, then just add the functionality back in a new PR. Accept that mistakes happen, adopt some QA controls to catch them, and build a culture that encourages your developers to care about your product.