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Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
571–580 of 704 posts
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or be a bona fide 'script kiddy', learnt some WordPress PHP or whatever and got a job as 'webmaster' or something straight out of school (UK-sense, I specifically mean no university), no formal CS/software eng. training, never properly an intern/junior trained by people who know what they're doing. I'm sure it happens. And then you get the next job with 5y PHP experience or whatever, employer doesn't mind no formal t…
If such a team of 3 people comprised of script kiddies and 5y PHP coders are going to create a $20m/year product, you can be sure that they will take precedence over anyone who was 'properly' educated in cs when it comes to hiring. > I'm sure it happens Yeah it does happen. While using the Internet, quite frequently, you are looking at such products developed by such teams, making millions of dollars a year. Even as…
The shitty software probably isn't the product. It could be some sales/inventory management tool or whatever, that before they got some 'script kiddies' in was just some forms in Microsoft Access (is that what it's called.. the forms on top of database tool we had to learn in ICT at school) orwwhatever.
I think many people here are reacting to $20M forgetting not everything's a SaaS/in the business of selling software (but mostly still has some (in-house) software somewhere).
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#573First of all: PHP is fine. It really is. Second: Doing a full rewrite with a junior team is not going to end well. They’ll just make other mistakes in the rewritten app, and then you’ll be back where your started. You need to gradually introduce better engineering practices, while at the same time keeping the project up and running (i.e. meeting business needs). I’d start with introducing revision control (git), then…
> home-written framework towards Laravel I would think about that very long. Over the years, experience has shown me that regardless of what framework or library you use, you introduce a lot of dependencies to your app when you build on such a framework or library. The common sense says that they should make things easier, and at the start they definitely do that. But over the years, you start encountering backwards-…
I don’t disagree with this :) It absolutely depends on the situation though. Having a foundation which is maintained and (perhaps more importantly) documented properly by a community can be quite powerful.
My original point was more about the need for a long term technical vision, because I’ve found this to be an invaluable guiding star as I make smaller decisions along the way. Sometimes I need to change course before realizing this vision, but having a vision still helps. I’d feel like I was stumbling in the dark without this.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully agree with this, but I think it misses a key step: As the team’s manager, it’s your job to get buy-in from the executives to gradually fix the mess. You don’t need to tell the team exactly how to fix it, but you gotta get buy-in for space to fix it. One approach is just to say “every Friday goes to adding tests!” (And then when there’s some reasonable test coverage, make fridays go to refactoring that are eas…
Do not waste time with a company that is going to collapse unless they are willing to do whatever it takes.
They are going to collapse making 20M a year, sure.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#575Write e2e tests befores you change or consider refactoring at all.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just start somewhere. These guys are making changes, actual functional changes and bug fixes in that environment meaning they already have all the problems you imagine are going to get in the way of fixing this mess. So stop fretting and just start small with one tiny thing. It doesn't really matter with what. You don't even need automated tests necessarily. It's a small simple flow that needs 10 minutes to run the s…
Not sure the little hammer will fix much. And making folks use a method in new code pisses them off. "You say important I do this your way this time, even though there are 1000 examples of doing it the other way. I feel persecuted and your way is pointless, because it doesn't fix everything anyway. And its slowing me down and making me look bad." Not rational but folks don't have to explain their feelings. You will b…
The little hammer definitely fixes. It does it in the same way as water cut the grand canyon. The beauty is that it works over time.
Now as for how to get the other devs on board, I agree with you that you can't just barge in and tell them everything they are doing is wrong etc. I never said to do that and I'm replying to a specific comment in the thread not the original Ask HN.
I.e. when I write about what I've done in the past, I got buyin from my boss and my colleagues on what I was going to do. But I didn't just sit there and kept doing what they had done over the past years. I changed lots of other little things too in the same manner.
So if we do want to talk about the original Ask HN and how to get the existing employees not to hate you, you can start by letting them tell you about what they think the problems are. What are their pain points. They might just not know what to do about them but actually see them as problems too. Maybe they've tried things already but failed or got shot down by others in the company. Maybe they did try to introduce version control but their non tech boss shot them down.
Of course it may not work out. Some people really are just stupid and won't listen even if you try to help them and make them part of the solution.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#577First off, no, a full rewrite is not only not necessary, but probably the worst possible approach. Do a piece at a time. You will eventually have re-written all the code, but do not ever fall into the trap of a "full re-write". It doesn't work. But before you re-write once line of code - get some testing in place. Or, a lot of testing. If you have end-to-end tests that run through every feature that is currently used…
> 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…
You must have missed the part where it makes 20M revenue per year.
I gotta love hacker news, people who think the fact a backend is written in horrid PHP means it is "already not functional" while they spend their days learning something like Haskell that make them negative revenue per year.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#578Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#579Earlier 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…
You must have missed the part where it makes 20M revenue per year. I gotta love hacker news, people who think the fact a backend is written in horrid PHP means it is "already not functional" while they spend their days learning something like Haskell that make them negative revenue per year.
Who knows if that 20m revenue should be 60m? They could be held back greatly by the fact that the developers are not motivated to change anything.
I also don't know Haskell and have no desire to learn it. I prefer to build products in static compiled languages where I can more easily hire developers.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#580> this code generates more than 20 million dollars a year of revenue From a business perspective, nothing is broken. In fact, they laid a golden goose. > team is 3 people, quite junior. One backend, one front, one iOS/android. Resistance to change is huge. My mistake, they didn't lay a golden goose--they built a money printer. The ROI here is insane. > productivity is abysmal which is understandable. The mess is just…
Sheesh, I had to look this far to find this comment, half of the top comments were discussing how much testing OP should do and what manner he should approach the act of refactoring things while ignoring that the "monster" generates a boat load of money for the company. I love hacker news a lot but people seriously need to get out of their developer box and look at the big picture.