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Always done great on greenfield projects, but suffer on anything else?

2 points by me_me_mu_mu ↗ HN
Most of my tech career, I have had the chance to work on greenfield projects. Now, for the last few months, I have been on a team where we're maintaining some existing software.

To keep it short, I hate it.

I find the codebase is unnecessarily complicated, and I am having a hard time adjusting to the team's way of working.

What do I do? I brought this up with my manager and he rightly said "sometimes we just have to do the work" but short of quitting I feel like this sucks.

3 comments

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buttocks
Everything is better when you have a hand in building it afresh, and everything is worse when you come in later and have to maintain someone else's code. "What do I do?" - you learn to make it tolerable. If there's some tech debt that makese everything miserable, work on it. Get some satisfaction from that. If possible, start improving on the software so that you can have some ownership and agency in it.
JonChesterfield
Brownfield is much harder.

Working on it for a while is likely to change how you approach future greenfield projects though. There may be merit to parts of the codebase and/or new team's way of working that are not immediately apparent. It's also intellectually demanding along different axes to building things yourself.

Parts of codebase and the way of working may also be nonsense. Potentially difficult to distinguish from the happier alternative.

I'd suggest sticking with it for a little while before quitting.

desktopninja
It may seem overwhelming and anti-pattern to what you're used to but its also an opportunity for lots of little wins. At some point the excitement of being in a green project will start to appear again.