Rails programmer with ~10 years of experience here, recently I've been hired as a PHP programmer and I'm dealing with a very complex and undocumented codebase that I wish I never seen before.<p>You might ask "why did you took the job in the first place?", well that's either because I can't find work in my area and most of it is PHP/Python work and I can't move either, the Rails related work that is remote requires that I move and remote work tends to be "US remote".<p>The PHP code I'm working with is extremely complex/messy and most of the code is undocumented, I have to do lots of debugging just for changing the simplest things and I'm also not very familiar with this language.<p>Most of the code is a mess of spaghetti code, think of HTML, JS and PHP all glued up with no proper structure.<p>The git repository is also one of the biggest repositories I have worked with (247 MB), 45,000 files and 1 million lines of code for the whole project.<p>I was already able to complete some tasks but I can't help but feel miserable with this project.<p>Recently my manager started asking me questions like "How's it going? Will you finish this task today?" and I explained to him I'm having difficulties with the code and that I'm not very comfortable working with it but he's insisting that I stay firm at it and get familiar with the code. Please advice.
Sorry man. Sometimes you just have to deal with shit code. We've all been there.<p>Are the people at the job nice? Do you have freedom to work as you please? Do you have the time to take the code in a better direction? I'm just trying to help you find a bright side.<p>I'd say there are two possible paths here. Either the job is overwhelming to you, or it's not overwhelming but just extremely unpleasant. If it's overwhelming, I'd say to explain that to your manager and request an immediate short-term re-assignment. If it's just unpleasant, then follow your manager's advice. You might be holding your nose for a while, but you will adapt to it and it will get easier.