Did you ever rewrite big pieces of code without management knowing?

Is starting it without consent the same thing? When they realized I was doing it they were not happy but I kept it secret for about half the dev time.

In the end what triggered management was the word "refactor". Management has issues with anything that is associated with mistakes, so our Jira doesn't have "bug" tickets and teams that rollback releases have harder times scheduling subsequent releases and additional red tape to navigate.

I understand there will be teams that are just punching the clock who don't care about or learn from mistakes, but this doesn't feel like the norm in this industry to me. I suspect that the replaceable cog mentality of management brings some generalization about labor as being all highschool burger flippers regardless of the industry or product.

Regardless, knowing what spin will trigger management and avoiding it is better than doing it on the DL IMO. If management is aware but unclear on what the details are they will at least allocate time to your effort.

Not really, but in the days before open source was as accepted as today, many large companies had policies against using open source. I was working as a consultant at a Fortune 500 and was starting a new project. I wanted to use Java Spring for dependency injection and its other features. InfoSec said NO.

So I billed them for the next 3 months to write a Spring IOC clone, doing exactly the same thing to use on the project.