I'm in the midst of maintaining/fixing one of those and I find it a great opportunity if you A) want to learn outside your comfort zone, B) enjoy figuring out problems that aren't just technical (talking to people, design, organization), C) want to get out of a coding-grind lifestyle.
Our organizational structure isn't immutable, it just moves slowly. After about a year, my team's effort resulted in measurable improvements for both revenue and end-user experience.
If you're senior dev level and want more of a challenge that's not just throwing more code at the wall, these sorts of scenarios are something to seek out.
Sometimes. I'm actually fully on board with what you said, but the situations I found and was describing are usually environments where they just expect someone to put their head down and code.
When I say "not willing to make organizational commitments..." I specifically mean they don't give you access to people -- stakeholders don't want to be bothered by the devs. It's far too common.
What you're describing though is a great situation -- I love those engagements.
That sounds really fun. I've done greenfield Rails projects and I've learned that what I really like and find rewarding is this kind of slow reorganization of something that already exists. It's like remodeling a house--maybe it was well built initially (and maybe not!), but you get to spend a lot of time inside of someone else's mind. You know, when they had good days and things just clicked, when shit was on fire and they just had to make it work. The results of seeing meaningful improvements to something like that is just fantastic, to the point where you're now excited to add on to the codebase.
Our organizational structure isn't immutable, it just moves slowly. After about a year, my team's effort resulted in measurable improvements for both revenue and end-user experience.
If you're senior dev level and want more of a challenge that's not just throwing more code at the wall, these sorts of scenarios are something to seek out.