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

With good reasons I might say :).

Now I'm really curious, is there some exciting non-obvious reason for a tracking pixel to be purple? Was it #FF00FF or more like #6600DD?

I saw this in the past a few times. There is no universal recipe, if this is what you are looking for. Get some development and stage environment and make them use Git, that's a start. See what is the plan for that software, maybe the company does not want (you) to waste time and money with it, if they want to do something, discuss and align that.

In the end, if it works it brings value. If you want to rewrite it, it will bring some value and some cost: which is bigger and what is the priority, a rewrite or new features?

One more thing you can do it show the developers how to do some things in a better way, like composer or cleaning up versions and dependencies, but take it easy and present it to them in a way they will buy it and do it themselves, not because you told them so. Make them better and they will make the product better.

- You need to get an understanding of why things are the way they are. Team of 3 people seems small. Is the team always in firefighting mode due to business constantly dropping things in their lap. - Do not attempt a full rewrite. Here be dragons & krakens. - One of the first things to do is to get your code into source control before you do anything else. That gives you insight into how often the code changes and in what way it changes. - The routing, templating, caching, curl requests, dependency management issues all stem from the no framework issue. - You are going to face varying levels of resistance. Part of that is going to be from the business side of things

My suggestions:

- You need to get management to understand the problems and on board with reform as soon as possible. Avoid framing the issues as technical problems. Explain the potential risks to bottom line resulting from business continuity failure or regulatory/compliance failure (esp if your industry is health/finance/insurance). If management is not onboard, your reforms are very likely going to be dead in the water. Might be best to cut your losses. - Get your code as is into git asap. - You will need more hands. At the very least, you need a senior who can help hammer things into a structured pattern that the juniors can follow. - Carrot is going to be much more effective for convincing your devs to adapt to new changes. Understand their pain points and make sure to frame things as not questioning their competence. The understanding needs to be that their time is valuable and should be spent on this that deliver the most value to them and to the business. - Business unit needs to rework their aggressive roadmap. I suspect there's an element of 'we always have delays in releasing so we need to keep the pressure up on developers to keep momentum up". You need some kind of process in place for managing roadmaps (We're currently working our way towards scrum across the business. It's difficult but persistence even in failure is important). - We've attempted rewrites of one of products. It took much longer than we planned (currently still in progress). What we're currently doing is using laravel as a front end to the legacy apps (laravel receives the request and passes it on to the legacy app in the same request) It is working well so far and has the advantage of allowing us to use laravel's tools (query builder, eloquent, views etc) in the legacy app. Then we can progressively modernize the legacy functionality and move it fully into laravel.

Also, remember to breathe and take a break now and then. Wishing you good luck. If you want to talk more or just vent, hit me up at voltageek [at] gmail.com.