How do you tackle the case where the codebase is consistent in a bad way, like pervasive use of antipatterns that make code difficult to change or to reason about? If you want to improve that, you have to start somewhere. Of course, Chesterton’s Fence applies.
Or when people keep the old pattern because there's a "higher priority".
I've worked on a project with absolutely terrible duplication of deserialisers of models, each one slightly different even those most properties were named the same and should've been handled the same. But we can't touch anything because important things are happening in business and we can't risk anything. The ignored part was that this led to bugs and extreme confusion from new people. They were even too worried to accept a repo-wide whitespace normalisation.
In the past I have performed needed refactorings as part of new feature development, without asking permissions. Even though my boss at the time said “don’t make it pretty, just make it work.”
Of course, I knew that writing the code the “pretty”, more maintainable, easier to understand way wouldn’t take any longer to write, and might take less time as the refactoring requires less new code overall.
But I didn’t bother explaining all that. Just nodded then went and implemented it the best way as I was the experienced software engineer.
