I would've changed your code from promise chains to await statements (after warning you, of course) because they just look awful. And I would then have expected you to buy me a beer for getting rid of all that ugly code.
So you would've spent company time rewriting working code to match your personal aesthetics?
Sounds like parent didn't have a reasonable structure in place to generate consensus amongst the org about stylistic preferences vs tech debt, and where developer priorities should lie.
There's some ego in both of your comments as well. Async is nicer looking that promise chains, but there risk in changing working code, no? Growing with an org means letting go of your old code but joining an org requires empathy and understanding for the old timers and their code babies as well!
I assume you are looking at things for a living. And from your corporate tone, so are your coworkers.
We all want to look at good things. Promise chains were bad things. When I see bad things, I am willing to make the change. So should you. And we should ask before we change. GP was caught off-guard. That is not what we want.
I don't look at things for a living, I trade time for money with the expectation that my time has a multiplier on revenue, profit, and team health/productivity. I guess I've seen enough legacy code at this point that I don't have any desire to change it just because there's something better, changing stuff that works has to be a reasonable balance between tech debt/maintenance/quality of life things, vs features/uptime/performance. Of all those things, features make the most money right? So why would I want to spend time refactoring things when I could make measurable, incremental improvements somewhere else? Spend all day in the same system? Sure. Drive by refactorings? Absolutely not.
Refactoring a large JS codebase is like painting the proverbial Forth Bridge. By the time you've finished, fashions have changed and it's time to rewrite it all again.
It is exactly what I did with bluebird before async was even part of the language back in 2013, and when async finally arrived all we did was a simple regex replace. So yeah, I am pretty consistent at what I do and everyone who disagrees is just cringe.
Async/await isn't exactly a fad that is going away anytime soon. If refusing to refactor outdated pieces of code is your idea of "fun" then I feel sorry for your coworkers.
What does 'outdated' actually mean here? It's a sign of lazy or fashion-driven thinking. If there's a good reason for refactoring a pice of code, it should be possible to articulate that reason without reference to the date it was written.
I mean, fair enough, everyone has their personal opinions on style. But these battles can end up with the losing side leaving the company. This was a net loss on both sides: I lost income & a job I otherwise enjoyed while the team lost the key AWS expert that took months to originally fill.
Ironically, a team is probably more likely to lose competent people in such a scenario because they are the ones with many opportunities. A former manager of mine was more than happy to fast track my hiring to my current role.
I had some time to think about this comment, and I really like it. It demonstrates the issue underlying issue I was getting at with my original comment, but didn't express because it would not have come across as believable. I've encountered a lot in my career and has been the impetus for my last three job changes.
Hearing this tells me three things: you don't respect my work, you're publicly demonstrating that you're better than me, and that you're entitled to something from me for putting me in my place. Microaggressions like these are difficult to work with, no matter how much you're paid.
I'm sure you're a great developer, you've probably been promoted a lot, lead a big team and are generally well liked (at least on the surface). However, there are lots of developers and engineers that have been put down their entire lives and never really developed the social skills to stand up for themselves. Somehow, even over the internet, people like you can hone in on this and leverage it.
