- Takes weeks or months to get simple features out the door, and when they're out they're buggy as hell and the bugs never get fixed. Sound familiar?
> I’d never touch any line of code unless I absolutely have to
And this is how legacy code is made. Years of everyone "never touching anything they don't have to" leads to a giant steaming pile of shit.
> unless the business is willing to face some down time
How does a simple refactor cause downtime? I do this kind of stuff all the time and pretty much never cause any downtime. In the very rare cases that prod downtime does occur it's generally not because of some simple code refactor, and we have it back up in no time by just rolling it back. Unless it's not related to the code at all, in which case it also wasn't a refactor that caused it.