The convoluted code definitely didn't help (message passing between several processes, 4000-line functions...) Oh man, yeah. This kind of thing's hard enough i

The convoluted code definitely didn't help (message passing between several processes, 4000-line functions...) Oh man, yeah. This kind of thing's hard enough in a single threaded monolith, much less when you've got multiple processes! One time I was actually able to kill/retire a whole bunch of external processes and bring stuff back into the monolith. Yeah it made the monolith 1% bigger or whatever, but I think it was 100x better than throwing more services into the absolute gangbang of dependencies in which we were already drowning. I'm glad you were able to move on and had other stuff to work on. Looking back, I probably should have just found another job rather than push through those legacy maintenance slogs. Lost sleep and hair for years, and it was sort of a career black hole.