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Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

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Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#191

Post by sakoht »

It makes $20M a year. That sounds like great code.

I would: 1. Get it in source control without “fixing anything”. 2. Get a clone of the prod server up and running, vs a clown of the db. 3. Put in something to log all of the request/response pairs. 4. Take snapshots of the database at several time points and note where they occur on the log history from number 3.

You now have the raw material to make test cases that verify the system works as it did before, but for bug, when you refactor. If the same set of requests creates the same overall db changes and response messages, you “pass tests”.

First thing to refactor is stochastic code. Make it consistent even if it’s a little slower so you can test.

Once you can refactor, you can do anything. Including a full rewrite but in steps that don’t break it.

If you try to rewrite it from scratch it will probably just never be deployable. But you’d an rewrite it safely in chunks with the above.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#192

Post by bsaul »

speedgoose wrote: post #118
rudi_mk wrote: post #104

Save yourself a lot of trauma and get out of this mess. Been in a similar situation, spent five years trying to fix things, gave up. Could have saved myself some of the therapy I now need.

Yes, life is too short and there are so many much better jobs to waste time on such a project.

i can imagine how some super senior engineer may like this kind of very challenging experience.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#193

Post by ipaddr »

Fire the front/backend developers and hire the best php full stack you can. Start a new php framework project and move code over. 2003 php code is straightforward and easy to port. If you try to move to a new cool language you will lose whatever is special now.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#194

Post by jokethrowaway »

You're making 20M, you spend probably less than 500k between you and 3 juniors.

I've lead rewrites in worse circumstances (larger codebase split in 30 microservices, 15 people across 3 teams, making just 2M per year!) and I don't think you can do it with your current team. In the above examples we downsized the teams to 1 team with 4 people and then rewrote to 2 rightly sized services.

The new team was all new people (introduced gradually), while we shifted out the previous employees to other areas of the business.

The bottom line you have to use with management is you need a more senior team. Hiring seniors is pretty hard nowadays and it doesn't sound like you can offer much of an environment.

Get a good agency for 1M / year and let them work with your team to understand the ins and out and then replace them.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#195

Post by brigandish »

beachy wrote: post #53

Plenty of good suggestions in here about e.g. tests, source control etc. You will need them all. But I would start by choosing how and whether to fix up the crown jewels, the database. You say that instead of adding columns, team has been adding new tables instead. With such behaviours, it's possible your database is such a steaming pile of crap that you'll be unable to move at any pace at all until you fix the datab…

Good point. Using stored procedures / views etc will help crystalise the API for the DB and allow work to happen behind that wall without breaking anything else in the meantime too. Once the work is done, bits of the wall can be replaced with better bits of wall i.e. improved sp's and views pointing to an improved schema.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#196

Post by k8sToGo »

hnfong wrote: post #154
ncmncm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20M revenue is not the same as $20M profit.

> team is 3 people, quite junior. Even at FAANG salaries this wouldn't be that much compared with $20M

The engineering team might be 3 people but not the whole company.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#197

Post by jtsiskin »

hnfong wrote: post #154
ncmncm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20M revenue is not the same as $20M profit.

> team is 3 people, quite junior. Even at FAANG salaries this wouldn't be that much compared with $20M

Yes, but the parent is saying this could be an e-commerce website, or construction company, etc. But having an iOS app feels unnecessary for most of these businesses

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#198

Post by can16358p »

First thing: talk with both the management or whoever non-technical you need to report to, and explain the situation and negotiate timeframe. Then talk to the techies too and kindly tell that things need to change immediately.

After you've got a working time window for getting things right, prepare a workflow that should take half the time you've discussed, as it will probably take twice the time than anticipated. (if you've negotiated on 3 months of fixing the mess, assume you have only 1.5 months or even 1 month and prepare 1 month's worth of work)

Then I think the very first thing should be moving to Git (or other SVN), setup development/staging environment and using CI/CD.

After making 100% sure the environments are separated, start writing tests. Perhaps not hundreds or thousands at this stage, but ones that catch up the critical/big failures at least.

After it start moving to a dependency manager and resolving multiple-version conflicts in the process.

Then find the most repeated parts of the code and start refactoring them.

As you have more time you can start organizing code more and more.

It sucks but it's not something that can't be fixed.

Also finally, given the work environment before you came, it might be a good idea to block pushes to the master/production branch and only accept it through PRs with all the tests requiring to pass, to prevent breaking anything in production.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#199

Post by jokethrowaway »

lumost wrote: post #66
latchkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't work. That's simply not true. I've inherited something just as bad as this. We did a full rewrite and it was quite successful and the company went on to triple the revenue. > get some testing in place Writing tests for something that is already not functional, will be a waste of time. How do you fix the things that the test prove are broken? It is better to spend the time figuring out what all the featur…

The problem with people new to the company starting a rewrite from scratch is that they often are poorly informed on why things were the way they were before. If you start big, you can have bad outcomes where the new system might be objectively worse than the old one... but you are stuck trying to get the new thing out for the next 5 years because too many people sunk too much political capital into it. As an example…

The problem is that most developers are crap and self centered on working with the tech they like.

You need to work with someone who doesn't care about filling up their CV with "ruby microservices" and get stuff done.

If I went into a business to do a rewrite and decided to use $shinyNewTech because I want to build up rust experience I'd probably end up wasting years with little results.

Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?

#200

Post by lordnacho »

gamegoblin wrote: post #37
rowanG077 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. You are literally saying do a full rewrite. But it's also the worst idea? Edit: A full rewrite always meant replacing every part of a system. Whether you do it gradually doesn't really matter.

He’s saying to Ship of Theseus the codebase. Don’t build a new ship and then burn down the old ship. Replace the old ship piece by piece in place.

That only works if the new pieces correspond to old pieces. If there's no good structure to build on, the units to be replaced will constrain the architecture of the new ship.

At some point you end up trying to change a pumpkin boat into an aircraft carrier, and there's no obvious way you can do that one piece at a time.

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