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A comment on Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the ... by jehlakj on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @10:13PM (#18557738)
That was my mistake when I first started. The manager didn't think it would take too long to finish a task. Well, the naive me, without even looking closely at the code, didn't think it would either.

But I realized the more I understood, the more dependencies needed to be changed. While it's still doable, things started to break and I ended up learning way more about the project than what was required to finish the task. In the end, it took me longer to finish it.

The fact that most of my coworkers would write a hacky solution in a short time, it made me feel incompetent. Managers without a technical background don't look at code, they look at results. So how do you even do #1 when the "other devs" still work there and can get stuff done much quicker?

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Re:Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the ... by lostctown on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @10:38PM (#18557862)
The sad truth is that in order to bear the cost of a long time horizon in the pursuit of elegance you need one of two things: extreme trust or total control. Even then the pursuit may lead you astray and ultimately result in failure. Until there are ways to transfer experiences from one mind to another in an efficient manner, few manager/higher ups will sympathize with a desire to take on more long range, highly technical code improvements (assuming we're not talking about a FAANG).
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