Got my first job in a web development company. I am on a trial period, which means at the end of two weeks they will evaluate my performance and give me a full time contact. As a trial I am given task to work on internal CMS system. And OMG!! the coding is horrible. I think someone can start from scratch and redo the entire thing faster the adding new features to that piece of Hell!! Am worried after 2 weeks my performance is going to look bad.

You can probably not bad mouth the CMS too much if they built it themselves. Also it might look like you are blaming someone else. But perhaps a slight mention that the coding style was a bit foreign to you but you are now getting used to it and picking up speed?

@Elkstorm Yes that is exactly the reasons I don't want to say anything. It will look like I am not fit for the job and I blame others for my shortcomings. I will get some features working if not all and also let then know, I had issues debugging.

Don't sell your soul for the sake of a pay check. Write a report on the Cms system explaining its pitfalls, and why starting a new improved version will allow you to introduce new features more rapidly and all the reasons why a refresh would be advantageous to them and how more cost effective it would be. If they don't buy in to it. Get the fuck out, cos it will only get worse working for closed minds.

I agree with the previous comments. Write a thorough analysis and how you can improve the CRM.
Position it in a positive way. Maybe mention new technology, methods... If you can quantify savings and ROI they will like that.
Good luck and please us know what happens.

@jumpshot44 and @helloworld as my role of IT manager people who write analysis of others code could spend their time better, it would make me wonder why/how has this person found time to write a very comprehensive analysis of the code to prove to me it's poor.

I appreciate that it may be seen as helpful, but in an environment like the one I work in we have to get stuff done. That's why our erp was written in access and new features are being written in access (bleurgh) we analysed it and got quotes for rewriting as a .net application and decided the time taken to rewrite would be massive. I personally hate this application however the cheque writers won't sign off on an 80k budget to rewrite.

@philcr supprised you've not appraised the many erp solutions available (which can be easily customised) which would be considerably less than creating a bespoke solution from scratch. I stand by my advice.

@helloworld as a business we have no choice they have about 8 years of development into this application which if you work out is approximately 210k in Dev costs. I joined about 2 years ago so the costs would have been about 50k less.

Sadly our MD remembers how much he spends on IT and is seen as a nessecary evil resource, e.g. When he bought a car station 3 years ago for 2k he still thinks it's worth 2k.

I have to do a little bit of remedial database work occasionally and it's done with full hazmat gear and tongues to make sure none of that shit sticks.

As far as I see it, you have 2 responsibilities during this trial.

1) Show you can apply yourself to a task and complete it to an acceptable standard.

2) Learn the background of the application. I reckon every single contributor here has a story of picking up a bespoke application full of truly chronic code.

But understanding how that situation arose and the constraints imposed can help you understand why things came to be the way they are. Maybe there were a lot of contract developers involved? Maybe requirements and deadlines were poor (very common for internal projects). Maybe project owners demanded a certain coding style or approach that, nowadays, looks silly. So many reasons. Figure them out.

You may find out that the team knows the code is poor and would like to change it in many ways, but priorities are different at different levels.

@philcr - this is a good discussion. I understand your point of money invested, the cost of rewriting and analyzing but I believe by staying with a solution you hate, probably for very valid reasons, it may not be the best long term business solution for your company.

As @helloworld mentioned maybe you do not have to build from the ground up. There may be extensible Third party developed systems you can build upon. I just bought an amazing enterprise .Net solution to a different problem that I am totally customizing but 90% of the work was done and tested.

The access solution seems like it is demanding significant dev time and expense. I do not know the details but maybe a new solution can help reduce expenses or generate more business revenue?
If the business knew a new system could produce an extra $50k a year and identify more customers it could make business sense and would be a very impressive addition to your resume. Numbers are good.

What do you think?

@Jumpshot44 all very valid points, the reason the existing solution is so expensive is because we use a contractor, I'm not totally sold on this.

The underlying database could easily be brought up to scratch and the front end could be rewritten by me for example for considerably less than using a contractor. A week of my time to the business is about one contractor day.

I want to use something that we can get 3rd party support for. I believe before this system was started they did look at things like sugar crm, but either couldn't understand or didn't know how to customise.

We now have some really bespoke stuff that integrates to Autodesk products for work planning, some other modules that link to stock machines.

To sum up I think as @jumpshot44 says we as a business should maybe appraise 3rd party solutions rather than appraise the code behind the dog turd.