I'm currently leading a team in a group of teams responsible for a terrible code base. It's riddled with tech debt, our DB is maintained by others and has absolutely atrocious performance, it often feels like I'm the only one who cares about all our tech debt, typescript errors, linting errors and browser warnings, and I worry that the reason I'm the only one is that I'm the most recent hire. I still care.
I'm now spending my weekend thinking about a problem where a really urgent feature I wrote doesn't work because the query behind it is too heavy for the database (the query isn't anything special, but it's against a view that clearly isn't properly indexed), and the DB people are complaining I'm overloading the DB. But it's going to be shown to the regulator for some important regulatory rule for which noncompliance is costing us tens of millions per year. Next Tuesday. Which they told me last Tuesday.
How am I supposed to write good code in that kind of environment?
I'm now spending my weekend thinking about a problem where a really urgent feature I wrote doesn't work because the query behind it is too heavy for the database (the query isn't anything special, but it's against a view that clearly isn't properly indexed), and the DB people are complaining I'm overloading the DB. But it's going to be shown to the regulator for some important regulatory rule for which noncompliance is costing us tens of millions per year. Next Tuesday. Which they told me last Tuesday.
How am I supposed to write good code in that kind of environment?