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Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
611–620 of 704 posts
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#612Hey boss, do you know that Jim is leaving? The backend dev, yeah him. I know, it'll be a devil to backfill his role. If only we had some sort resilience built in to allow us to bring in more team members to cover situations like this. We can afford it after all. And we don't want to stop printing all that money just because someone leaves. Tell you what, let me work on a plan, yeah, let me think about how we make the code easier to learn, maybe easier to test too so the new guy doesn't break anything while he's learning the ropes. Sure, no problem boss.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#613Replace these 3 "junior" developers generating 20m revenue with a hand picked team of kubernate bros and you'll be -2.5m in the hole.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also starting by fixing the js/css/html front end is likely the safest, as it wont corrupt any customer data & it will be visible when something breaks. That can probably be the next best candidate to do a major overhaul. I'd also hope that a $20M/year project can afford to hire someone senior in addition to these 3 juniors?
why would someone senior even want to join this team? Especially someone senior enough to fix this. The productivity is horrible and there's no kudos for fixing something that's lived for 12 years like this.
For the love of refactoring.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. You are literally saying do a full rewrite. But it's also the worst idea? Edit: A full rewrite always meant replacing every part of a system. Whether you do it gradually doesn't really matter.
They’re saying to do it, eventually, incrementally and not all at once.
And critically… never completing an incremental rewrite doesn’t matter. Everything remained working the whole time and continues to make the company money. And as a bonus, you were also able to make feature changes that the business wanted at the same time. It’s classic XP, when the money runs out, the system still works!
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect OP does not have the corporate experience to handle this situation. I agree with this. OP doesn't say, but reading between the lines, corporate at best doesn't understand the ramifications, but corporate doesn't care about the ramifications. They're getting 20 million in revenue from 3 cheap devs. Things are going great, according to corporate. They're not going to learn, and OP is going to get blamed whe…
>snowball them Could you define this phrase and what English dialect it's from?
Quite literally. I assume you never got a snowball in you eyes?
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#617Can you tell us what the code does? Just a bit curious.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree it's the sane answer. But I don't think these engineers are incompetent. They lacked direction, accidentally followed worst practices, and _still_ came out on top. I would say they are good engineers but perhaps bad project managers / architects.
You don't not use source control because nobody directed you to and you 'accidentally' .. what, forgot about it? You don't use it because you haven't heard of it; = not competent.
If someone incompetent can make me $20mil a year in revenue, bring on incompetence!
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#619First of all: PHP is fine. It really is. Second: Doing a full rewrite with a junior team is not going to end well. They’ll just make other mistakes in the rewritten app, and then you’ll be back where your started. You need to gradually introduce better engineering practices, while at the same time keeping the project up and running (i.e. meeting business needs). I’d start with introducing revision control (git), then…
It's worth re-emphasizing this point: "Doing a full rewrite with a junior team is not going to end well."
Or a senior team.
Re: Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
#620What does the code actually do? Just a bit curious.