throwawaysbdi

Webforms is the newest thing. Most is far older

It's literally so ancient that we bought the remains of the company that designed the language when they went under

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 have a theory that the company is for sale and the owners don't want their ancient stack to show up on Google search in job descriptions.

If it's not that you guess is as good as mine :)

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.

Some webforms but the majority is in a much more ancient and niche language I won't name because it's too specific to this company.

Damn that's relevant

My expenses are too high to walk away and there's nothing I can do about it for a couple years. Otherwise I would have walked out several times over.

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

It's too small a company to maintain my anonymity. Small enough that it's unlikely to burn any fellow HN readers if that makes it any better

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

I should clarify that's over 20 deep of our code , not counting all the framework stuff.

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