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

This is a lot. I have done a rewrite approach before. It is only one option, but if you're committed, it's probably the one that has the best chance to preserve your sanity. It can work, if you're clever about it.

The goal is to slowly build up a parallel application which will seamlessly inherit an increasing number of tasks from the legacy system.

What I would start with, is building a compatibility layer. For example: the new code base should be able to make use of the old application's sessions. This way, you could rewrite a single page on the new system and add a reverse proxy one page at a time. Eventually, every page will be served by the new application and you can retire the old.

I would stick with the language but pick up something more capable, ie. Laravel. This makes it easy to copy over legacy code as needed.

Godspeed.

What percentage of the $20M are you getting per year? If it's less than double digits then you should run as fast as you can and look for more fun and rewarding work.

Why is it necessary? It's ugly, but it's earning millions. Find out why resistance to change is huge. Maybe the devs are stuck in their ways, or maybe it's too damn scary for them to fail because the business comes down hard on them? Get to know your devs, find out from them what they think the problems are and how they would like to solve them. Maybe they just need more help. And as the team lead it sounds like you need to bring the "business unit" up to speed on the current reality?

There’s that joke graph about “happiness in the life of a thanksgiving turkey”, where things are going amazingly right until a straight drop to zero. It works “right now”, up until it doesn’t, or there’s an outage that you can’t recover from, or some bad code wipes prod and your backups are useless (in this case likely nonexistent).

It also sounds like it isn’t really working even right now - from what op claims the productivity is not at all able to meet the deadlines being imposed by upper management. Death by competitors moving faster with a better product is a real thing, and if the tech stops them from doing so, that’s a problem.

The best strategy probably isn’t a rewrite, as others have suggested, but “don’t touch it if it works” is frankly an irresponsible strategy.

I’ve worked in a team where poor core tech (along with a sort of emporer-has-no-clothes situation where upper management found it politically impossible to acknowledge the issue) directly killed the profit, although this was in the market making space which has a much more direct reliance on technology. they got into their situation with exactly the attitude of “if it works, don’t touch it!” and basically stayed still while the competition flew ahead of them. Their product “worked”, in that it did what it was supposed to, but iteration on quality of trading and strategies was next to impossible.

This is the way.