I did that job, just after university, but that is not my comment. I bookmarked it though because that person said it so well.
You will write bad code, because what you already find there - and that one company is not alone! - is already so bad, there is no way to do a good job on top of literally millions of escalating hacks.
And don't think that you could clean this up - not even with ten years of time is that possible. You can only rewrite from scratch. Trying to rewrite even a tiny part is like picking up one spaghetti and always ending up with the whole bowl on your fork.
It is possible that some projects like Oracle are beyond hope but in general cleaning up a messy code base is done piece by piece and by refusing to merge most patches which make things worse. Better than you found it is the main principle.
Just wanted to comment on the fact that I remember seeing that comment, and it left such an impression I remember it 7 years later.
Thanks for the reminder, going to bookmark it this time.
I did that job, just after university, but that is not my comment. I bookmarked it though because that person said it so well.
You will write bad code, because what you already find there - and that one company is not alone! - is already so bad, there is no way to do a good job on top of literally millions of escalating hacks.
And don't think that you could clean this up - not even with ten years of time is that possible. You can only rewrite from scratch. Trying to rewrite even a tiny part is like picking up one spaghetti and always ending up with the whole bowl on your fork.