Ask HN: Codebase at my work is a complete mess, what should I do?

Recently I joined a relatively small company (50-100 employees) as a medium level software developer. For a while I was very excited about this opportunity.

After few days/weeks of getting to know the whole codebase I finally moved to a specific project I was suppose to work on and I found out the code is a complete mess. Often I find parts of code that unintentionally affects other parts of code. Some parts are just copied and left there doing nothing. Even names of classes/variables are sometimes useless and project structure is unintuitive and seemingly without rules. It's spaghetti and relatively big spaghetti (tens of thousands of LOC).

I started "repairing" the project but there're no tests to check whether my adjustments are correct.

I'm so frustrated and depressed by it. The job basically turned into something I hate - I'm just rewriting the code! The person in charge of this project was working on it alone and from the outside it all looks fine and it's working. So this makes the higher people think that it's all just fine. I really don't know what to do. Should I just go and basically say that this person did a bad job? I don't feel very comfortably doing that because (a) I'm a relatively new hire, (b) the person in charge is working there for about two years and (c) I'm much younger than she/he is both professionally and biologically.

I've already made some comments about rewriting it and the response was basically "ok".

Are you working at my company?

Ok, more seriously: that’s the way existing code is about 90% of the time - it’s the reality of working in our field.

It may or may not reflect on the original developer. Maybe they were learning a new framework. Maybe they were rushed. Maybe it was originally intended as a prototype but ended up in production. Maybe the requirements have grown or changed significantly since it was implemented and the original design didn’t scale well (this is to blame for most of the awful code where I work). Maybe they’re just not very good.

If you’re going to take this to management, I would not bad-mouth the original developer. I would suggest framing the issue as the code not scaling well to the new requirements.

Then give them a few options with trade-offs. It could be that management is willing to spend the next few years playing but whack-a-mole to avoid an extra couple weeks on the project to put it under test and refactor a bit. It could be they think the fix up is worthwhile now if it’ll save them a month’s worth of development time in the next few years, but not if it’ll only save a couple days. It could be that they intend to rewrite the entire area of the product in 6 months and only want to invest the minimum effort in changes until then.

Yah i went to a big name host and found the same thing. I was fooled into joining because I met with a data scientist and an "experienced web developer" without actually looking at their code. Long story short, 2 years later it was the most frustrating experience ever and I left, hating the code the entire time. I was paid a lot and the people were cool so that made me hang around but the culture promoted hanging on to legacy code and creating scenarios where the people in charge fostered chaotic code practices by not giving a shit and always moving on to the next thing without ever cleaning up after themselves. I would recommend you to leave sooner than later as it will not get better unless you are the one that does it all or gathers some like-minded people to go forth with you but really that's too much effort IMO and you should just bail to a better scenario when you can.

Popularize the value of tests. Test, refactor, repeat. 2 years of legacy spaghetti isn't really that bad. I work for a company whose codebase is at least 14 years old in places, and there have only been serious testing efforts for 2-3 years.

Chances are, the code is a mess because nobody who knew better was empowered or motivated to advocate for a better way, but you have a hidden opportunity to be that hero.

Good luck!

Somebody fathered a legacy codebase.