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

> Let's say you start to write tests and start to see issues crop up. Now what? How do you fix those things?

I assumed the tests wouldn't be for correctness, but for compatibility. If issues crop up, you reproduce the issues exactly in the rewrite until you can prove no one depends on them (Chesterton's fence and all).

The backwards-compatibility-at-all-costs approach makes sense if the product has downstream integrations that depend on the current interface. If your product is self-contained, then you're free to take the clean slate approach.

You sound frustrated that you've joined a company with an absolute stinker of a codebase, because you're confident you could deliver much better results having refactored it first. You're managing a group of people probably enormously under-productive because of the weight of the technical debt they're under. Every change takes months. It's riddled with hard-to-fix bugs. It's insecure. There are serious bus factor problems.

Many of us have been in this exact position before, multiple times. Many of us have seen somebody say "our only choice is a full rewrite" - some of us were the one making that decision. Many of us have seen that decision go disastrously wrong.

For me, the problem was my inability to do what I'm good at: write tests, write implementations that pass that test, etc. Every time I suggested doing something, somebody would have a reason why that would fail because of some unclear piece of the code. So rather than continuously getting blocked, I tried to step into my comfort zone of writing greenfield code. I built a working application that was a much nicer codebase, but it didn't match the original "spec" from customer expectations, so I spent months trying to adjust to that. I basically gave up managing the team because I was so busy writing the code. In the end, I left and the company threw away the rewritten code. They're still in business using the shitty old codebase, with the same development team working on it.

If you really want to do the rewrite, accept how massively risky and stressful it will be. The existing team will spend the whole team trying to prove you were wrong and they were right, so you need to get them to buy into that decision. You need to upskill them in order to apply the patterns you want. And you need to tease apart those bits of the codebase which are genuinely awful from those that for you are merely unfamiliar.

Personally, I would suggest a course for you like https://www.jbrains.ca/training/course/surviving-legacy-code, which gives you a wider range of patterns to apply to this problem.

Revenue isn't the same as Earnings Before Salaries either.

E.g. maybe it's an e-wholesaler or widget reseller, bought $19M goods and sold $20M. Or maybe it was much slower than expected, they actually bought $25M goods and are burning 500k/month on warehousing. Or whatever.

Get out. I’ve been there and tried in earnest fixing things. Without management’s understanding and an “aggressive roadmap”, you’re doomed to fail and burn yourself out in the process.

It got this way exactly because management doesn’t see the point or the problem. The fix isn’t technical (not yet), it’s cultural and strategic first which isn’t something you have control over.

> This business unit has a pretty aggressive roadmap as management and HQ has no real understanding of these blockers. And post COVID, budget is really tight

In my view, as long as management believes this, a fix is not possible at all.

You should forget about improving the code but see your job as a kind of consultancy thing where you teach management about what they have and the consequences of that are.

And probably look for a new job. If you are completely successful with teaching management, it may be working on this, but it'd probably need to be renegotiated as if it were a new job