You Don't Need Permission to Fix Your Data

Let me tell you about a junior engineer called Sam. Sam had been on the team about four months when I noticed something in a pull request. Tucked between two routine model changes was a new schema.yml entry — five accepted_values tests on a column called customer_status that had been silently accumulating fourteen different spellings of “active” for the better part of a year. Nobody asked Sam to do this. It wasn’t in a sprint. There was no Jira ticket. Sam had just been working in that part of the warehouse, noticed the mess, and decided to clean it up on the way through.