> There's often a wise tradeoff between criticizing systems you've just seen after being at the company 5 minutes and waiting 6 months to understand the context.
I know this is reasonable advice, but it makes me deeply cynical. After 6 months I will have learned to live in the shit (to use your term), and so it still seems like I have nothing to gain by speaking up or trying to fix things. A culture that accepts shitty code probably isn't supper demanding for an experienced developer who is accustom to the mess, so I'll just coast through my time and hop jobs after a few years.
If nobody wants to respectfully talk about my criticisms on day one, then they wont really want to at 6 months either. In the end I'm lead to believe I should have zero concern for code quality and only worry about my personal reputation.
This is exactly where I am at right now. I have a million dollar mortgage and interest rates are going up. I'm keeping my head down and perpetuating technical debt until I can hop jobs for a higher salary.
Criticising the status quo is not a winning move for me, especially when it's lead to the company's engineering team tripling in size. If I'm asked, I'll pick some low hanging fruit– remove reliance on legacy/redundant JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, and spent time writing better unit tests. But so far I haven't been asked.
I know this is reasonable advice, but it makes me deeply cynical. After 6 months I will have learned to live in the shit (to use your term), and so it still seems like I have nothing to gain by speaking up or trying to fix things. A culture that accepts shitty code probably isn't supper demanding for an experienced developer who is accustom to the mess, so I'll just coast through my time and hop jobs after a few years.
If nobody wants to respectfully talk about my criticisms on day one, then they wont really want to at 6 months either. In the end I'm lead to believe I should have zero concern for code quality and only worry about my personal reputation.