Ask HN: Started a new job and their existing code sucks. What to do?

I started this new job and the current code is so spaghetti that it's almost an Italian restaurant. No good practices are being followed, there are no tests, huge components that should be modularized, no organized architecture at all.

The current developers working on that code aren't very experienced and, even though they acknowledge that some refactoring is necessary, they don't think that's a priority (and that we should focus on bug fixing). However, the thing is so messy that they've been spending the last few months just bug fixing - while refactoring the code would have solved most of their problems.

What would you do? Just don't care and keep doing what you're told to do (bug fixing/closing Github issues) or actually starting refactoring (or rewriting it - sometimes I feel an urge to rewrite the whole thing from scratch) on your own?

This is my first time starting a job with such a bad existing code, so I have no clue about how to proceed. I'm just feeling very depressed having to work on that everyday. :/

Talk to your boss. If you feel strongly it needs to be done, explain why, and what the benefits are. You need to be able to quantify and qualify this so do your homework and sell it.

Contrived example: Hey Manager, we've broken this experience 12 times in the last year, so I'm writing unit tests for it, so we can't do it again without knowing. It will take me an extra few hours on this issue but the payoff should be worth it. I think we should do this for everything.

In the meantime, leave everything you touch better than when you opened it. Start teaching the practices you want to see.

This is a good book on the topic refactoring a large code base with no tests.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-...