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Comment by ttz | Hacker News Reader

> They inherit a codebase that successfully made enough of the right quality-vs-speed tradeoffs

Or was lucky enough that all the choices they made did not blow up yet.

I totally understand the value of technical debt. But I have also seen in the wild cases where people thought the codebase was great simply because they hadn't run into cases where its rotten core would be exposed.

Yet.

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Yeah that’s my current place. When I got there management didn’t even realize how bad the code was or that spending 70% of dev power on big fixes wasn’t acceptable.

I'm going through something similar. I recently scheduled a call with my engineering VP and highlighted the ratio of branches prepended with "hotfix" vs. "feature." It was a simple way to get their attention. With that perspective it's becomes fairly obvious there are some problems here that should be identified and addressed.

Sounds like it worked. My current place has basically done everything a guy could ask for (when given a nightmare codebase) so I no longer believe it’s always a systemic issue. My employers arent engineers and weren’t aware how poor their codebase was.

For any mid engineers who run away from spaghetti, I’ve learned identifying and solving that spaghetti problem can be a huge leap forward in your career towards management/leadership roles provided you find the right company and are able to solve the spaghetti issues.

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