What senior engineers do: fix knowledge holes
I work on some software of which the oldest parts of the source code date back to about 2009. Over the years, some very smart (some of them dangerously smart and woefully inexperienced, and clearly - not at all their fault - not properly mentored or supervised) people worked on it and left.<p>What we have now is frequently a mystery. Simple changes are difficult, difficult changes verge on the impossible. Every new feature requires reverse-engineering of the existing code. Sometimes literally 95% of the time is spent reverse-engineering the existing code (no exaggeration - we measured it); changes can take literally 20 times as long as they should while we work out what the existing code does (and also, often not quite the same, what it&#x27;s <i>meant</i> to do, which is sometimes simply impossible to ever know).<p>Pieces are gradually being documented as we work out what they do, but layers of cruft from years gone by from people with deadlines to meet and no chance of understanding the existing code sit like landmines and sometimes like unbreakable bonds that can never be undone. In our estimates, every time we have to rely on existing functionality that should be rock solid reliable and completely understood yet that we have not yet had to fully reverse-engineer, we mark it &quot;high risk, add a month&quot;. The time I found that someone had rewritten several pieces of the Qt libraries (without documenting what, or why) was devastating; it took away one of the cornerstones I&#x27;d been relying on, the one marked &quot;at least I know I can trust the Qt libraries&quot;.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter how smart we are, how skilled a coder we are, how genius our algorithms are; if we write something that can&#x27;t be understood by the next person to read it, and isn&#x27;t properly documented somewhere in some way that our  fifth replacement can find easily five years later - if we write something of which even the <i>purpose</i>, let alone the implementation, will take someone weeks to reverse engineer - we&#x27;re writing legacy code on day one and, while we may be skilled programmers, we&#x27;re truly Godawful software engineers.