[ttz]

> They inherit a codebase that successfully made enough of the right quality-vs-speed tradeoffs

Or was lucky enough that all the choices they made did not blow up yet.

I totally understand the value of technical debt. But I have also seen in the wild cases where people thought the codebase was great simply because they hadn't run into cases where its rotten core would be exposed.

Yet.

[edgyquant]

Yeah that’s my current place. When I got there management didn’t even realize how bad the code was or that spending 70% of dev power on big fixes wasn’t acceptable.

[scruple]

I'm going through something similar. I recently scheduled a call with my engineering VP and highlighted the ratio of branches prepended with "hotfix" vs. "feature." It was a simple way to get their attention. With that perspective it's becomes fairly obvious there are some problems here that should be identified and addressed.