How to convince bosses to give up bicycles?

Question

CMS

What is the point: the web studio where I work, instead of using ready-made solutions for projects, decided to invent their own bicycles. This resulted in my cms and crm. They have been developed long and hard for the last 5 years.
On cms, a couple of dozen sites and several portals were implemented. All sites were developed at different stages of cms development (stable versions were not kept, sites were molded from the last commit in the cms branch. Sometimes core changes from portals were merged into the cms branch, sometimes not). From my own experience, I know that you should start developing on this cms only with its improvements. Sometimes even basic functionality is missing. There is documentation, but often it does not save, and all the difficulties that arose were solved only through the author of cms. And I am sure that if you use frameworks for portals, and one of the popular cms for websites, this will save a lot of time and money for the company (sometimes it took weeks to develop elementary modules due to cms architectural problems).
The situation is similar with crm - the code is often without comments, there is no documentation at all, only the author knows how to modify and maintain it, a sea of ​​​​functionality and business processes.
It so happened that the authors of crm and cms quit, leaving all this legacy to us, those who came to work later. There are some projects at different stages of readiness with obligations to customers and a sea of ​​unfulfilled functionality that were built on this cms. It is difficult to estimate the period of transfer to some ready-made tool (for example, one project took 2-3 months of development and hung, and the customer woke up recently) and it is not a fact that we will be able to meet the budget on current projects. But I am sure that if you leave everything as it is and continue to develop these bikes, the studio will only lose financially (and the moral of its developers) in the future. Because at the moment, if there is any difficulty, you will have to study the kernel and read the code, not the documentation. This is a lot of time with a dubious profit.
The authorities are proud of these developments and do not want to listen to anything. Even last week, when it was known for sure that the cms developer was leaving us, it was decided to develop a new site on a bicycle.
How are such problems generally solved? How to develop cms in such situations, and is it worth doing this at all? I think that even if the authorities do not accept our arguments in favor of the technology stack and ready-made solutions, and decide to upgrade the staff, new developers, seeing the code, will only burn with the desire to transfer and rewrite everything. Or maybe I'm wrong, and all this is far-fetched and people dive into other people's bikes during development without problems (personally, it doesn't work for me at all when the code is tricky)?

Answer 1

Leave.

Answer 2

Don't worry, you'll be fired and rightly so. And that's why.
I'll start from the side of a good businessman:
He already has cms and crm, which he sawed for 5 years, knows how to sell and knows. Yes, it happened, his bicycle, terribly written, but he does not care as long as she feeds him and all his wards. Abandoning it means not only a huge time investment to change everything, from teaching programmers how to cut it, ending with training everyone who will touch it. It also means supporting two systems already, old clients with the old one and new ones with the new one. But the most important thing is the high risk that it will be harder to sell it.
From a good developer:
And a good developer doesn't give a damn about what to work with. Ask the experienced. To get emotional at the sight of shitty code and bicycles is the maximalism of a young programmer. Developers with experience can dive into any bike, into any shit code and work with it. But because they have already seen each other and at one time also screamed and tried to turn the world upside down, but who needs it? You are an employee, you don't have to write beautiful code, you have to solve business problems. Experienced people do this, just sometimes sighing to themselves, tk. the feeling of beauty still cannot be killed :)

Answer 3

If management has spent 5 years on this, then no argument will help. These people are brainwashed. Common sense is missing. Don't try to change people. It's not real. Just look for those with whom you think in a similar way.

Answer 4

Everything can be done.... (no matter how strange it may sound....)
1. You need to draw up an architecture diagram, create a list of classes and their methods, functions, etc..
2. Overlay files on the architecture in order to understand where what is being done.
3. Then, architecture and code refactoring (if necessary and if there is time).
Continue work.
PS: not a very pleasant job, but without it, everything will definitely fall into place in the near future on this solution without the necessary understanding and documentation of the developer.

Answer 5

evnuh is 100% right.
Don't treat business owners as idiots. Perhaps the current CMS is tailored for a specific segment of customers and due to this it is sold. If the current CMS developer leaves, you may well take responsibility for the development of this cms and refactor it. Cure the ills of this CMS and move on with peace of mind.
If you want to convince the business owner, then learn how to count the benefits not as a developer, but as a businessman. What audience is the CMS aimed at, what are the current sales and development costs (in money, not abstract man-hours), how much will the transition cost, how will the costs \ profit change when coming to standard CMS? These are just a few of the questions. Provide the owner with a fan of solutions from which to choose the best for the business.

Answer 6

As far as I understand, the key point is that you do not want to maintain the old code.
if the salary is white, quitting yourself may not be profitable, so then you can continue to sabotage the development + like trying to figure out the code, but it will be all slow until you get fired.
although the trick may be that increasing the time is not so bad for business. 5 years ago, there were fewer options for ready-made cms crm, now customers have a choice where to go and what is cheaper for them - to develop the old system or make a new one, given that they have a lot of information in the old one and will need to transfer it and retrain the staff. everything is individual here - it may be more profitable for someone to continue to pay more but leave everything as before - you can kill their business (or cause damage) if the company refuses to develop these CRMs.
it is desirable to bring this analysis to the authorities, now, so that they are ready.
- describe the problems of the existing code / development process and what they result in
- the fact that without the creators of the systems from the development will go much more slowly.
- a proposal to make at least for new sites on ready-made systems - but here we need a ready-made alternative and their comparison.
- write the conclusion that you want / do not want to develop the old code and are ready / not ready to quit if they decide to leave the old one (that is, for example, “ready to quit if we leave it the old way” or “I don’t like the old code, but I’m ready to stay and support it if it is need").
having written a letter, they can naturally be fired and look for someone who agrees to support and develop the old code, in order to force them to change the development system, the authorities should see the numbers associated with money, how it looks from the inside, they don’t care. calling numbers in money directly can be difficult for you because you may not know specific numbers, so call numbers - terms.
you don’t know the right solution for business, you only see the code, and the solutions can be different
- look for someone who wants to develop it
- completely switch to a new ready-made platform (transfer from old to new - it’s not at all clear how much it costs and how realistic it is)
- close company before it's too late
- look for an intermediate solution
if it is written without emotion, then it will be able to make the right decision for the authorities. although, of course, it may be unexpected and not desirable for you, for example, to fire you and raise the salary of those who leave 2 times so that they continue to support it, but as far as I understand, they themselves are tired of shit code and want to merge in time, so it’s unlikely that they will be able to keep.
since you like to write the right code, then the right words also do not hurt. you need to be friends with the authorities and help them develop their business, but you yourself cannot decide how to proceed further.
if you don’t talk about this, the studio most likely has no future - you will sabotage slowly (maybe unconsciously - thoughts that everything is bad will take a lot of energy instead of spending it on work) - deadlines will start to drag out, go out of budget - leave in the minus - in any case it will not be comfortable to work.

Answer 7

There is one way, only shhhh, he doesn't say a word to anyone. You take a box of vodka, get your boss drunk, undress him, undress yourself, take incriminating pictures, then the usual blackmail and the trick
In fact, why ask this question here. Have you presented these arguments to your superiors? Did it not agree? Everyone, either be patient or leave. There is nothing more to discuss here.