Seriously without Stackoverflow I would be unemployed.

I have a co-worker who won’t stop “refactoring” our codebase. He will go on a long tangent — under the guise of working on a proper story — and then reveal proudly after a few days that he now introduced a new middle-layer into the code which will help us such and such.

I have never seen any benefit from this. I think sometimes cleaning up variable names is nice, but a lot of the things just add noise and complexity. He’s a junior dev, I’m a senior dev. My progressional opinion is that he is doing a bad job. Management doesn’t know the full extent and the lead programmer scolds him every now and then but in the end let’s the code changes pass code review. “It has already been implemented so what’s the harm”.

Then the rest of us are stuck with horrible merge conflicts. I recently noticed that some new business-important unit tests that I wrote were mysteriously gone. Oops — lost in some misguided refactoring I guess. I’m assuming they were failing after the refactor, so clearly they had to go... Fortunately the underlying logic still works I think.

His main tactic in all of this seems to be to just use argumentative stamina. He will lose discussion after discussion but doesn’t seem to care. He’ll just talk and talk. And the in the end the lead tech gives in. And/or doesn’t have the energy to catch the error introduced.

I swear, the company would be better off without him. Maybe even better if we keep paying him but he just cleans the toilets instead. Sometimes I almost believes he gets up in the morning to come to work and just fuck with people all day.