I would say that over a decade of my career was coming in as a freelancer to fix codebases where a couple of people tought they knew better than the previous ones and proceeded to add yet another very different block to a codebase already spaghetiffied by a couple such people.

Sometimes it was coding style, sometimes it was software design, sometimes it was even a different language.

I reckon thinking that just deploying one's EliteZ skills on top of an existing code base without actually refactoring the whole thing will make it better is a phase we all go through when we're still puppy-coders.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

The majority of puppy-coders I've encountered (including myself) actually want to refactor rather than just add onto. They are fundamentally correct in this, but they don't grasp that 1) few companies want to acknowledge that the code base which is their greatest tangible "asset" is actually complete shit, and 2) that due to their inexperience, their refactored replacement is probably going to end up as bad as or worse than the original.