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Photo by Anete Lūsiņa @anete_lusina on Unsplash
It’s happened to us all. You finally get the job after eight rounds of interviews. You’re in. It’s going to be great.
HR smiles warmly as they tell you how excited they are for you to work on “cutting-edge technology”. You nod enthusiastically. You tell your friends you’re going to be building “the future”.
They forgot to mention a few of the details. Your task is to revive an undead legacy codebase that predates your understanding of version control. Your manager tells you that there’s great documentation, and you believe them.
In my current job they didn’t mention that people are rushed. It’s difficult to ask people for anything like help when they don’t have time to do anything over and above their own work. I guess that’s what hardcore working means.
Enter the Crypt
The reality hits somewhere between your first “coffee chat” and the moment your laptop finishes installing the company VPN. Instead of deploying containerized microservices in Kubernetes, you’re knee-deep in code that’s allergic to modularity, sprinkled with TODOs from developers who are no longer with us.
This is the norm for developers.
Because in the real world very few codebases are “new” or “modern”. They’re “mature” which in tech-speak means “held together with hope, duct tape, and the collective denial of five generations of engineers”.
Documentation? You Mean That 404 Page?
Every new job comes with its own rites of passage. For developers, that rite often involves trying to figure out what a random Python script named fixstuff_legacy_FINAL_v3_reallyfinal.py actually does.
If you’re lucky, the previous maintainer is still around. If you’re really lucky, they haven’t emotionally detached from the project yet. But don’t get too excited. Their introduction will go something like this:
“That part? We don’t touch it. Just…try not to change too much.”
And that’s it. That’s the onboarding. Everything else you’ll figure out by reverse engineering the commit history and praying the comments (if they exist) weren’t written ironically.
You’re Not Special
New developers often think they’ll be joining to build something shiny. You know, new, AI-integrated pipelines, sparkling new greenfield technology and exciting new features to work on.
What they actually get is this:
Fixing bugs filed in 2021 by someone who is now a yoga instructor
Adding features the architecture was never intended to support (Good luck adding real-time notifications to that cron-based monstrosity)
Keeping an eye on a flaky CI/CD pipeline that fails 1 out of every 3 times because of a shell script nobody understands
You were hired to innovate. But what they really needed was someone to keep the lights on and occasionally plunge the toilets of tech debt.
You Can’t Rewrite It
Of course, your first instinct might be, “Let’s rewrite this mess”.
I remember spending three months trying to get my team to support me in refactoring one class. At the heart of the codebase, this monstrosity was terrible and prevented us from shipping features.
You know what happened? Nobody bothered to do anything. Nobody cared, and that was that. We kept patching problems and actually delivered a few features for our customers. That rewrite never happened. Not now, and I rather expect it will never happen.
The Real Superpower
This is where we come full circle. That article you read about onboarding and bad documentation? True. But let’s go a step further: this isn’t a rare or unfortunate situation.
This is the job.
Your real skill as a software engineer isn’t just writing clean code. It’s deciphering the mess others left behind without flipping a desk. It’s maintaining a system designed by ghosts using patterns they invented in a fever dream. It’s performing surgery with duct tape and being proud when it mostly works.
Knowing When to Ask For Help
I’m not sure how to write this part of the article. My current job is going badly. That’s because my superpower is to work things out, and my other superpower is listening. When people are prepared to help you for ten minutes here and there but don’t offer to give you a hand in the future, you know where you are.
You’re in a culture where asking for help may be overtly encouraged but covertly discouraged. If you make a mistake coding you’ll be punished, but if you do not pull your weight in the team, you are also certainly in trouble.
The way out of this situation? I’m sorry but I just don’t know. I’m trying to scrape by the best I can if you’ve any suggestions, please do write them in the comments for this article.
Conclusion
So next time you hear “greenfield,” smile politely. But quietly prep your environment for dealing with spaghetti code, missing README files, and a database schema last updated during the Obama administration.
Because what you think you’ll do when you start a new dev job and what you actually do?
Different universes.