It was a lie of omission but I'm not sure if that makes it any better. I was hired to work on a new project but it wasn't disclosed that the project hadn't been started yet and has already been delayed for years
I wasn't hired to work with old junk. if I would have known I never would have taken the job. I also don't have enough money to walk away or risk standing up to management.
The code isn't just old, it's very badly written and has zero documentation.
It's bad in a lot of specific ways but I'm trying not to out myself since it's a fairly small company.
The overarching problem is trying to reinvent the wheel because the management thinks we can do things better than the language designers.
The end result is a buggy and generally bad reimplementation of core libraries. ORM, math, dates, full text search. There's a half-baked custom version of everything.
Yes. The codebase is best described as a giant pile of hacks.
It's the culture more than the tech that causes this to happen. Every time I offer to refactor I'm told to fix it the fastest way and that's how we've been doing it for 10+years.
Relo isn't a problem and I definitely want to stay in this town. I can't really mark it as time off because I already did that a while back, I don't want to end up with a lot of gaps :)
I was thinking I could just apply to other places and be honest with them... But some may also frown upon me saying bad things about my current employer
Some of it is so obsolete and unique it would probably identify the company :) . The rest is slightly less old, MS webforms.
The webforms stuff isn't much better because the code quality is the worst I've ever seen. Adding features and fixing bugs is a stochastic process because you never know what will break.
Usually fixing a bug will expose an old fix that was done improperly for the original even older bug, forcing you to undo multiple levels of hacks to implement your own. It's nightmarish
It's difficult to be proud of anything I'm doing :). Whenever I propose a design for something, I'm told to do it the fastest way which is usually a bad hack.
I'm amazed the code works at all. The stack traces are more than twenty deep sometimes. I can't stand to look at it for more than 20 minutes without a break.
I need to be more careful next time I'm looking for a job
Why replace him? He's publicly unpopular but the company is worth more than ever, and the investors care most about money.
Why get rid of him when they're plenty of ways to spin the narrative. Like making unrelated but scandalous sounding press releases, and finding an occasional fall guy
Along the same lines, probably the easiest way to get quality in almost every type of product is to buy the commercial version. The people using these products are very familiar with them, so nobody sells garbage.
Businesses are also generally more conservative in future projections and less price sensitive than consumers.
I personally started doing this a few years ago. I even have a throwaway LLC that sounds nebulously like a contractor so I can sign up for "industry only" marketplaces. Since I can usually get wholesale prices doing this, I pay only maybe 30% more than for crap consumer level throwaway stuff.
The major downside is the time it takes, but the upside is that none of my stuff ever breaks.
That's the crux backers are lying to themselves about. The game doesn't exist and has already made more money than most blockbusters. Why waste profit developing it when you've already had your payday?
The best thing to do from a business perspective is just enough "development" to keep lawsuits at bay. In the meantime you start throwing as much money as you can off the train and jump clear right before it flies off the tracks.