I think the thing a lot of devs don't know is that there's a limit to refactoring. At some point, you're done. It's like a mountain. The team is dropped half-w

I think the thing a lot of devs don't know is that there's a limit to refactoring. At some point, you're done. It's like a mountain. The team is dropped half-way up the mountain. The dev that refactors all of the time continues to head up the mountain. It can be slow work. It's a tough climb. Most of the time, devs on the team don't know any better, so they just do the work in front of them, slowly sliding down the mountain. Eventually, they look at the mountain and say "There's no way anybody could conquer that! We're lucky just to get our work done without too many bugs!" Meanwhile, the refactoring dev reaches the top and slides down the other side. That dev starts looking for bigger mountains. The rest of the team he left behind sink into despair and cynicism. Eventually, when organizations grow large enough, most everybody lives at the bottom of the first mountain. Devs who leave and try to summit are ridiculed at best, shunned at worst. They're hated if they only go halfway and then fail. I am of the opinion that most big-organization developers don't actually know how to code. Sure, they know how to type in programs. Hopefully they know enough to test what they're writing. But a real understanding of what programming is? No. Until you've been over a few mountains you don't know what you don't know. Sadly these are many times the folks that get promoted.