I'm currently working in a geographically distributed team in a big company. Everybody is just focused on today's tasks and getting things done, however this means sometimes things have to be done the quick way, and that causes problems... you know, same old, same old.

I'm bumping into code with several smells such as: big functions pointless utility functions/methods (essentially just to save writing a word), overcomplicated algorithms, extremely big files that should be broken down into different files/classes (1,500+ lines), etc.

What would be the best way of improving code without making other developers feel bad/wrong about any proposed improvements?