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Comment on Ask HN: Senior engineers, how do you deal with poorly written software?

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staff/principal engineer opinion:

figure out business priority. if something in poor state.. it impacts you personally, you team, organization, overall business?

the higher it blast radius, speak with you staff or principal engineer and raise the issue. sometime tech debt accumulate over time while no one watching. at some point the debt must be paid or innovation will halt.

think closely about what makes it “poor” and what impact this has. i wrote most elegant code (me opinion) that never ship to production.

also worked on old..dusty messy code that go against design approaches. but it ship to 20 million customer and contribute hundred of million USD in revenue. so to say “poor” maybe meaningless at time because it actually make money vs me code that gave negative contribution ($0 earning plus cost of me and my teams time).

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