First step is to relax. You will see many codebases like this in your career, its not worth getting all worked up about. Slowly migrating a codebase like this t

First step is to relax. You will see many codebases like this in your career, its not worth getting all worked up about. Slowly migrating a codebase like this to a good one will take a bunch of work, but its a worthwhile challenge. They are lucky to have someone that cares about code quality! I would do the job you are paid to do, fix github issues to the best of your ability. Leave the codebase in a better place then you found it. Include small refactors with your code, talk to the other devs frequently and find their pain points in the codebase and take stories which relate to those. Its 100% not worth it getting depressed feelings for a codebase. I once worked at a startup with a codebase so poor that its hard to explain. The first month I was in a panic because I had 0 clue how to work with it. After a year the team slowly got it to an "ok" state. The truth is that the lessons I learned on that job have been the most important of my career.