At work, I've been promoted to a software engineer position. Which I'm really excited for. Originally, I was hired to support hardware technicians. But in the past year, I've been making software for the company. I wanted to show them what I could do and it seems to have paid off.

The problem, is that I'm getting ready to take over a project another guy created some time ago. He's the only one to ever work on this project and he's never had to report to anyone. So he's been able to do whatever he wanted, without recourse.

In the end though, the software works. It is just super frustrating because now I have to manage the code... and I'm frightened. I can tell he's an old VB6 developer, because he uses a lot of the old classes and APIs, instead of the newer .NET classes. Which isn't really a problem, but it's completely inefficient.

There's one section of code that he uses to grab the icons in a folder. I can't remember how long the code file was, but it had to have been 30-40 lines for just this. When you can do that in around 5 lines using .NET classes instead of the API. There's a ton of things like this. There's also almost no commenting, he ignores all errors, uses GoTo like it was mankind's savior and much, much more.

Monday is when I'll get a chance to really work on it, but I know I have a lot of work ahead of me. One of the senior developers had a chance to look at the code and he cringed. My manager told me to focus on cleaning up the code in the next 2 weeks. Doing so won't be terribly difficult, but it's going to be time consuming.

So this is me ranting, but does anyone else have any other stories like this? I'm curious.