First rant ever:

So I occasionally have to work for managers who say things like: "Don't reformat that code, the diff will look confusing in our repo browser". Said with such conviction that they initially made me feel retarded when I was more junior.

As time went on I realized that if we tried to "preserve" code so that the only changes visible were those that resulted in functional changes to our app, our code would eventually degrade into a steaming pile of unreadable piss.

I thankfully am working for a more technical manager at the moment so I don't have this issue and can make small refactors to make the codebase less gagworthy as I go.

I don't know though, maybe I'm wrong. Thoughts?