Comment by Twey

> Most rewrites answer to the engineer - what they want to learn, what offends their taste, what looks good in an interview - and not to the company paying the salary.

One big caveat to this is that a large (and increasing) part of the value of the senior engineering hire is their taste. ‘Taste’ as honed by the software industry approximates business needs that the business doesn't even know it has. Sometimes engineers struggle to articulate ‘why’ a particular change is beneficial because they're just pattern-matching: they've seen the existing pattern break in a dozen different ways in a dozen different codebases, so now when they see the same thing again it ‘offends their taste’ — it looks indefinably wrong even though it doesn't seem to be causing any direct harm right now.

(Of course, sometimes it turns out just to be that they don't understand what's going on, especially but not exclusively for more junior engineers. Pobody's nerfect.)