I just joined this company and the code base is all legacy code written in java and doesn't have proper architecture in many places. In discussions, I myself have suggested improvements and refactoring in the code.
In the first few tasks, they were only about fixing a specific issue. But during the code review, my coworker keeps adding comments about “improvements” which are about rewriting the whole file or in other parts of the code which I didn't work on, while the change was only in some lines that fixed the issue. I have talked about this with the team and with him that I have been asked to merge this soon as per the requirement. I don't find it good to do everything in one pr which was focused on one issue. It creates confusion and could break other things. not to mention, it takes more time than was given in the estimation. But he doesn't understand and keeps doing it in every code review. I talked about this with the architect of the team and he said, he also has asked him not to do it but he doesn't get it.
And in my last task, my task was fixing one issue but I found out in the next task, these files will be deleted and feature will be rewritten so I didn't do refactoring and just fixed the issue. in the pr comments, I only worked on impt ones and left the ones he wrote for refactoring the code of the whole feature, I left a comment that it is not required as we will be rewriting it in just next task and asked for review. But the next day, I saw he did the refactoring himself, pushed commits in my pr and changed everything I worked on, even tho it was not required at all.
I'd have done it myself if there was bandwidth and if we were not going to delete it in another ongoing task but I don't understand why he did this.
I asked him for an explanation in the team group, to which he only asked me to check his code and his preferred architecture which I am aware of as I'm experienced too, but he keeps assuming he knows better.
Should I have just ignored this and let him do whatever for my own sanity? Or should I involve my manager and talk about this? I'm sure this won't stop and he has been acting like this since I joined.
Is involving the manager better or worse in this situation? (it's a small team, i still will have to interact with him)
For context, I made this post few days ago – https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/yvsip0/how_to_deal_with_a_senior_dev_trying_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3