I kept my sanity at one place by working on refactoring every moment there wasn’t an emergency. I was trying to make all the changes easier. But that was after having tried several other solutions, including the dreaded Infinite Configurability, which has to be the absolutely best way to punish most of the team for how clever two or three of them are.

I’m working at a place like that now and it’s been an eye roller. After ten years on the project one of the problem people has finally seen this as a problem (though I haven’t heard him admit that he contributes). He’s looking at code now written by two people who have been copying his code style for years, and suddenly feeling the pain of it. It’s great he’s growing, but he’s over forty and should have learned this years ago. I blame a mix of things including staying at one place for far too long.

And I keep telling him this code used to be worse, but I’ve been chipping away at it for some time.