Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?
I would be careful with some of the responses here. Over my career I&#x27;ve found that a significant subset of developers struggle with unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes this has to do with their experience being mostly with greenfield projects and other times it is because they have not seen a wide array of different work created by other people.<p>But sometimes it is good old fashioned workplace politics. It is risky to take on an unfamiliar codebase as any problems are now your problems in the eyes of management. And it is, practically speaking, impossible to account for all edge cases and surprises that may exist in a legacy codebase. Therefore, framing the codebase as terribly written and a total disaster achieves two things politically. It helps set up blame for any issues in the future on the previous developers and their &quot;terrible codebase&quot; and opens the door for a much more enjoyable and lest risky greenfield rewrite.<p>My number 1 red flag of working with a developer, unless they are very early in their career, is hearing them describe a codebase as awful. Most really are not that bad and are usually just using unfamiliar and less than ideal design patterns and coding practices.