Ask HN: Efficiency of 10x engineer while refactoring legacy/messed up code base?

First off not all legacy code is "shitty." The main reason I am 10 or 100 or 1000 times more effective with legacy code is that I'm usually the only programmer the customer has talked to who will work with it. Everyone else has one solution: Throw it away and start over with [insert favorite cool language/framework/ideology]. So at least in my experience it's not that I'm 10X more effective, it's that everyone else is 0X effective because they won't even try.

It's easy and maybe fun to simply dismiss legacy systems as junk and shit and catastrophes, but when a business has a system that mostly works and they need some debugging, enhancement, improvement it's usually irresponsible to tell them to start over. When you do that you are telling the customer to throw away something that works, even though it has problems, and take a huge gamble on a new system that is 75% unlikely to even go live. You are telling your customer that your one hour reading of some code that you declare "shitty" is more informed than all of the cumulative experience of previous developers. You are telling your customer to change business processes, retrain staff, all on your word that you are more clever than the last team.

Imagine if you had a leak in the roof at your house and the first five people you called out to repair it told you to tear the house down and start over. And they told you that because the house wasn't built with the kind of lumber and roofing they prefer, or they don't think it's aesthetically pleasing based on their strict adherence to Frank Lloyd Wright's style. Or that whomever built the house must have been morons because they didn't properly label all of the wires and pipes. That's a story I hear about software systems every month.

The most important metric of software is whether it solves a business problem and adds value or not. What language it's written in, or whether the last programmer used spaces or tabs or camelCase or knew OOP as well as you think you do are not relevant metrics from the customer's perspective.

And since a lot of the code I work on is not actually that old -- in fact it's just as likely to be the unfinished remains of the last green fields team -- I can say without hesitating that the worst code to work on comes from programmers who are so committed to an ideology or language or toolkit they lose sight of requirements and the only goal that matters: adding value to the business.

I work with legacy systems all the time, lately mostly CRUD web apps, but I have debugged myself through pages of Excel macros, database drivers in enterprise systems and some code that was almost as old as me, and 100% agree with what you have written.

Bookmarking this post for future reference.

Sometimes they are required to tell you that. If there are obvious structural faults with a house then it's an OHS issue to be on the roof in the first place and the whole building could have to be condemned. A lot of software is in that state, but the organisations that use it have a remarkable ability to route around errors.

I do agree for the most part, but as an industry we still rarely find that middle ground where maintainers can actually do preventative maintenance and slowly improve things. Very few maintenance programmers are actually doing maintenance work, there bolting on new features or fixing prioritized bugs. If I was in charge of building maintenance then my success threshold would be considerably higher than "the buildings still standing".