Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
You don&#x27;t have a software problem, you have a people problem.<p>You have some directly measurable consequences of the underlying issues, as well as some obvious risks that are generally being ignored. Start with those:<p>1. Productivity is abysmal. Measure the time to implement a feature to get a feel for how long things actually take. How long does it take a feature from being requested by management to being released?<p>2. Unstated, but I&#x27;m guessing that release quality &#x2F; safety is generally low. (due to lack of testing &#x2F; staging &#x2F; devops &#x2F; source control). Measure this by looking at whatever system of bugs you can get (even if that&#x27;s just show me all the emails about the system in the last year).<p>3. An aggressive roadmap. You&#x27;re going to have to find some balance and negotiate this. If you happen to find a way to make the software better, but don&#x27;t deliver any value to the business, you&#x27;ve failed. Learning this developer failure mode the hard way kinda sucks as it&#x27;s usually terminal.<p>4. Resistance to change is huge. The team have so far been successful in delivering the software, and their best alternative to changing what they&#x27;re doing for something else might just be to quit and do that something else somewhere else. What incentive do they have instead to change what they&#x27;re doing here? This likely involves spending time and money on up-skilling. You&#x27;ve identified a bunch of areas that could be useful, now you&#x27;ve gotta work out how to make that change. E.g. actual time to attend paid courses during work hours on how and why to use git. You mentioned budget issues, but it&#x27;s worth considering this old homily:<p>&gt; CFO: &quot;What happens if we spend money training our people and then they leave?&quot;<p>&gt; CEO: &quot;What happens if we don&#x27;t and they stay?&quot;<p>5. You can see a bunch of risks, and the team knows them too. Right now, the team probably mitigates them informally with practices learnt from experience. (E.g. the add a new table with a join approach). Because the risks are adequately mitigated in their minds, there really isn&#x27;t a problem. You&#x27;re the problem for not seeing their mitigations. That said, by taking the approach of getting the team involved in risk planning, you may see them reevaluate those approaches and come to some opinions about what they need (i.e. source control, tests, devops, etc.)<p>6. Your people problem is such that you&#x27;re going to have to convince the existing team to accept that they made mistakes. However you do that you&#x27;re asking the team to reevaluate their output as a success and instead accept that they are failing. This might be the hardest part of any of this. To do so is going to take untangling the team&#x27;s identity from their output. If you don&#x27;t have the soft skills to do this, you&#x27;ll need a mentor or stakeholder that can help you develop these. You will fail if you don&#x27;t accept this.<p>7. Lastly, you&#x27;re fighting against one of Einstein&#x27;s quotes &quot;We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them&quot;. Are you sure you can fix the problems created by the team, using only the members of the team? Unless you can change their thinking significantly, or add more people with different thinking (yourself and one more developer), then you&#x27;re bound to fail.<p>I&#x27;d echo a bunch of jeremymcanally&#x27;s comments below [1]<p>On the technical sides:<p>1. Buy each developer a copy of &quot;Working Effectively with Legacy Code&quot; by Michael Feathers [2]. Book club a couple of chapters a week. Allocate actual work time to read it and discuss. Buy them lunch if you have to. The ROI of $100 of food a week and several hours of study would be huge. Follow this up with &quot;Release It!&quot; by Michael Nygard [3].<p>2. Don&#x27;t rewrite, use the strangler fig pattern [4] to rewrite in place. Others in this post have referred to this as Ship of Theseus, which is similar (but different enough). Spend some time finding some good youtube videos &#x2F; other materials that go a bit deeper on this approach.<p>3. In the very short term, try to limit the amount of big changes you&#x27;re bringing at once. Perhaps the most important thing to tackle is how each page hits the DB (i.e. stand up an API or service layer). If you try to change too many things at once, you end up with too many moving pieces. Once the impact of the first thing is really bedded in and accepted, you&#x27;ve earned enough trust to do more.<p>4. Stop looking at the symptoms as bad, instead always talk in terms of impact. By doing this you ensure that you&#x27;re not jumping to a solution before examining whether the issue is as big as it seems, and you acknowledge that each suboptimal technology choice has real business level effect. E.g.:<p>- Lack of dependency management isn&#x27;t bad, the problems it causes are the real issue (spaghetti code, highly coupled implementations, etc.). The business values predictability in implementation estimates.<p>- Lack of source control isn&#x27;t bad, not being able to understand why a change was made is the real problem. The business values delivering the correct implementation to production.<p>- Lack of automated testing isn&#x27;t bad, but spending time on non-repeatable tasks is a problem. The business values delivering bug free software in a reasonable time.<p>- Lack of caching isn&#x27;t a problem, but users having to wait 30 seconds for some result might be (or might not if it&#x27;s something done infrequently). The business values its users time as satisfied users sell more product.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32883823" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32883823</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;working-effectively-with&#x2F;0131177052&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;view&#x2F;working-effectively-wit...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pragprog.com&#x2F;titles&#x2F;mnee2&#x2F;release-it-second-edition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pragprog.com&#x2F;titles&#x2F;mnee2&#x2F;release-it-second-edition&#x2F;</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martinfowler.com&#x2F;bliki&#x2F;StranglerFigApplication.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;martinfowler.com&#x2F;bliki&#x2F;StranglerFigApplication.html</a>