I have seen projects that were all but dead from technical debt, that management simply refused to believe were dead.
I once worked on a system that was so messed up that fixing any bug would create 2 more. At one point, the entire team was only working bug fixes for 6 months straight and in the end, we had more bugs than we started with.
We tried to refactor the code several times but it was just so fucked up.
This was the stuff of nightmares. Most of the module consisted of one class with 50,000+ lines of VB.NET code in a single file.
Global mutating state referenced in functions everywhere. Functions that were 500-1000 lines long (today I have ESLint limit functions to 10 lines).
After working on it for over a year, I recommended to my boss that they initiate a complete re-write and made it clear that in my estimation there was NO saving this code base.
I got moved to working on single page applications in JavaScript, but when I quit that job and moved on roughly a year and a half later, that code base was still in production, generating ever more bugs for that team.
I once worked on a system that was so messed up that fixing any bug would create 2 more. At one point, the entire team was only working bug fixes for 6 months straight and in the end, we had more bugs than we started with.
We tried to refactor the code several times but it was just so fucked up.
This was the stuff of nightmares. Most of the module consisted of one class with 50,000+ lines of VB.NET code in a single file.
Global mutating state referenced in functions everywhere. Functions that were 500-1000 lines long (today I have ESLint limit functions to 10 lines).
After working on it for over a year, I recommended to my boss that they initiate a complete re-write and made it clear that in my estimation there was NO saving this code base.
I got moved to working on single page applications in JavaScript, but when I quit that job and moved on roughly a year and a half later, that code base was still in production, generating ever more bugs for that team.