When I’m managing a piece of spaghetti code, I entertain feature requests from a lot more people. It’s very difficult to add features to such code without breaking five different things. That’s not the requester’s fault. That’s the authors fault. I or the author made that bed, and somebody should goddamn well lie in it.

By the time the code is cleaned up, I offer advice on how someone else might implement it, unless I find something deeply philosophically engaging about the feature proposal, like thinking of something even better than what they asked for.

Getting mad at people who ask you to fix your own mess is a defense mechanism of people whose egos have outrun their abilities. I work with someone like that (and an enabler) and I will veto him ever working with me again. It’s a special kind of toxicity that feeds other people’s impostor syndrome.