I'm doing a lot of analysis - that's how I came to posses a vague understanding of the few tens of thousands of lines of code those 5 lines interacted with. Th

I'm doing a lot of analysis - that's how I came to posses a vague understanding of the few tens of thousands of lines of code those 5 lines interacted with. That's how the majority of that week was spent. Fortunately the codebases I work on are generally <1MLOC, <10 years of tech churn, had at least some decent coders helping keep technical debt from spiraling completely out of control, with management that will give them the time they need to manage that technical debt. So it usually takes more like 50 lines of WTF to confuse me to the point of needing over a week of basically pure analysis to untangle things. But I don't have enough time to perfectly understand the entire codebase and all it's dependencies. And it doesn't eliminate the need to manage the expectations of management. If they don't understand where things are at, even good managers will over-promise in their contracts (bad - enjoy crunch, slipped milestones, and missed payments!), under-promise in their contracts (bad - leaving money on the table), mistime their marketing campaigns, mistime their hiring pushes, plan the next project to start when the current one is just ramping up, fire the wrong people, hire the wrong people, hurt morale with unrealistic expectations... all kinds of nasty stuff.