I am finding somewhat difficult to carry on working in my current job.
The codebase has become a bit wild lately (but definitely not the worse I’ve seen), and I’m having a hard time dealing with some parts of the code. I could be stupid, but most likely it’s just that it demotivates me a lot to start working on something that is hard to reason about.
My boss is already aware of my thoughts – I expressed what it feels like to work like this. He asked me to provide examples of what was wrong. When I pointed out two or three small issues, he said ‘yeah, ok’ but that refactoring costs him a lot of money, and that we have to get the product out (not the first time I hear this).
I have to admit that the examples were not the most compelling, but the problem is actually tough to explain. It’s made up of a lot of tiny ‘bad decisions’ throughout the codebase. (We also see this issue is absolutely subjective). For instance, bad naming, dealing with nulls, boilerplate, not making code reusable (or the opposite) and so on. It can be tiring to re-think someone else’s code over again to justify I would have done it differently.
Do you have thoughts on how to deal with this? I am a bit fed up of having to go hacking around a quick ‘n dirty codebase every time!
Sometimes your fellow programmers do things very differently than you, and things you might feel are way wrong might actually have positive aspects. We all have our schools we come from. I think I’ve come across programmers who complain about things I don’t understand equally as often that I myself have felt something needs to be complained about.
Make sure you can deduce what you complain about into a concrete disadvantage. If for no other reason so that you can motivate middle management about improvements to make. Things that are hard to deduce into measurable facts usually originates from difference in taste/style rather than quality (there are boooks to read about this subject). The answer posted by smacl have good and concrete advice!
If you can deduce your concern into a real disadvantage, then I really do not agree when people say that one have to ‘accept’ situations like this. I’ve been exposed to this problem more than once, and let me tell you, refactoring is not the solution to the problem. Refactoring only fixes the symptoms.
Accepting a situation like this is the same as saying ‘bad quality product lines and expensive and frustrating maintenance is something my company can live with‘. This is ofcourse seldomly the case. However management (i.e. those with the go/no-go on what projects to prioritize) are very often not technically aware of what the problems are, or why development is expensive. They shouldn’t have to be for that matter.
That’s why you need a development organization with technical leads, chief architects, a good organisational structure and tiered model etc. Experienced software professionals who have seen where the road leads to if you ignore certain aspects of development. It’s about changing the ‘culture’ of your team(s).
Either you stick with your company and try to change how you do things from the roots, or you find another place to work and make sure you find out during the interview exactly how they work in every-day development.
Good luck