> This doesn’t happen when developers have trust they’ll be allowed to refactor although sometimes it’s a case of learned behavior from previous employment.
To my surprise, this is not always true. Some engineers do things because they have fun, even senior ones, and they will keep on refactoring things until there is a hard stop.
Best is to never generalize. It may depend from team to team, etc.
If you don't let them do this from time to time they will quit eventually, IME as a manager. Whether that's beneficial to the org or not is debatable. You can kind of "release the pressure" in a planned manner via hackathons, but those almost always never have the appropriate frequency.
To my surprise, this is not always true. Some engineers do things because they have fun, even senior ones, and they will keep on refactoring things until there is a hard stop.
Best is to never generalize. It may depend from team to team, etc.