This should be filed under "what to do when YAGNI, but your boss thinks Y are GNI?"

I'm in a new job, been here about a month, pretty much have a handle on my responsibilities, which entail maintaining a bunch of perl (yes!) and some coldfusion (bah!). Whether my boss overestimated the amount of work or I'm brilliant, I don't seem to have enough to keep busy, so today he told me to go write a subroutine to replace some logging code that happens in about 10 of our perl scripts.

The catch is that the requirements for these logs are different depending on which script is doing the logging (despite the fact that they are all being written to the same place), so essentially what I'm doing is writing 10 different logging subroutines and making them all one with some if/else style logic to decide which flavor to use. And it turns out that there is no business reason that he's decided to do this--no client request, etc, driving this. I think rather what is driving it is a) I'm not very busy and b) rewriting code is taken for granted to be good.

How do I have the conversation with him where I say "YAGNI" without sounding like I'm being subordinate/lazy? In my experience, grokking that this kind of anticipatory refactoring can be a waste of time is tricky for many people.

AH

p.s. Writing this post helped me figure out what I really want to do: I want to better define/standardize the logging requirements so that I can write a subroutine that can be plugged in to all 9 scripts. Thank you PM! Your thoughts are still appreciated, however.