A product/service in this state is a ticking timebomb. The fact that it's responsible for that amount of revenue makes it more dangerous. There are probably tens (maybe hundreds) of vulnerabilities that either compromise the whole platform, or at least give access to all customers' data.
IMO there are three realistic approaches:
- Keep it in its current state with the intent of making as much money as possible until the timebomb goes off, and then run away. Just to be clear, I don't think this is ethical, but a lot of people would choose it anyway.
- Ship-of-Theseus it into a supportable state.
- Leave ASAP so it becomes someone else's problem.
IMO the first one is only an option for the people that run the company. For the manager of the Dev team, they only have the second and third options, because when the timebomb goes off, they are going to be the scapegoat, not the person running off to the Bahamas with a sack of cash.
I've seen multiple ticking timebombs like this go off in years past, and I was usually part of the heroic efforts to stop the money hemmorhages that ensued afterward. I strongly recommend avoiding it altogether.
There’s that joke graph about “happiness in the life of a thanksgiving turkey”, where things are going amazingly right until a straight drop to zero. It works “right now”, up until it doesn’t, or there’s an outage that you can’t recover from, or some bad code wipes prod and your backups are useless (in this case likely nonexistent).
It also sounds like it isn’t really working even right now - from what op claims the productivity is not at all able to meet the deadlines being imposed by upper management. Death by competitors moving faster with a better product is a real thing, and if the tech stops them from doing so, that’s a problem.
The best strategy probably isn’t a rewrite, as others have suggested, but “don’t touch it if it works” is frankly an irresponsible strategy.
I’ve worked in a team where poor core tech (along with a sort of emporer-has-no-clothes situation where upper management found it politically impossible to acknowledge the issue) directly killed the profit, although this was in the market making space which has a much more direct reliance on technology. they got into their situation with exactly the attitude of “if it works, don’t touch it!” and basically stayed still while the competition flew ahead of them. Their product “worked”, in that it did what it was supposed to, but iteration on quality of trading and strategies was next to impossible.
Honestly, I know this answer isnt going to be that popular in some circles, but.. yes. leave it. If it offends your sensibility so much that you just can't be 'caretaker' for this mess, walk away.
But if it's "working fine and generating heaps of cash" as far as upstairs is concerned, there is no way you play the 'refactor/redesign/replace' game and come out ahead.
Also go work somewhere close to your standards. From experience I can tell you that this is a battle you can’t win in a reasonable time table. There’s a reason it is the way it is and you can’t change those people.
This is the correct answer. I’ve heard enough stories on HN about nightmare-level codebases that churn out massive profits. One dude had his entire application in a single PHP file and was generating like 20k/month.
leave it the fuck alone