Here is what I would recommend as a path, not towards changing "how we do things around here"(because that always gets negotiated against a certain business cas

Here is what I would recommend as a path, not towards changing "how we do things around here"(because that always gets negotiated against a certain business case), but as a way of gaining personal developer comfort(the actual nuts and bolts of the work): 1. Start adding logging all throughout, wherever changes are being made. That can quickly build up insight into what's happening where and gain confidence into what can be deleted safely. You want the meeting where you can show that an entire file is completely unused and has never once been called for months. It surely exists. Find it. Then say you won't delete it, you'll just comment it out. 2. As you make changes, start doing things twice: one in the way that patches the code as directly as you can manage, the other a stub into a possible design pattern. You don't want to force the pattern into production as soon as you think it works, instead you wait until the code hits a certain evolutionary state where you can "harvest" it easily. Think "architecture as a feature-flag". If it turns out your design can't work, nothing bad happens, you just delete those stubs and give it another go. 3. I would not actually worry about the state of the tooling otherwise. Backups for recovering from the catastrophic, yes. Getting the team on git, not as important. Adding standardized tooling is comforting to you because you're parachuting in. It adds more moving parts for the other devs. That's true even when they benefit from it: if the expected cost of wielding a tool wrongly is high enough to cause immediate danger, you can't proceed down that road - in woodworking that means lost fingers, in software it means lost data. You have to expect to wind down the mess in a low-impact, possibly home-grown way. There are always alternatives in software. And there are likewise always ways of causing fires to fight. This job most likely isn't going to lead towards using anything new and hot. But if you go in with an attitude of seeing what you can make of the climate as it is, it will teach you things you never knew about maintenance.